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MAN'S ORIGIN ] 



DESTINY 



SKETCHED FROM THE PLATFORM 



PHYSICAL SCIENCES. 



J. P. LESLEY. 



Corporate Member of the National Academy of the U.S. — Mem. A. A. F. A. S ■ 

Mem. Am. Orient. Soc. — For. Hon. Mem. Am. Acad. A. and S.— For. Cor. Geol 

S. London. — Assoc. Mem. Soc. Geol. du Nord. — Cor. Mem. SS. Neufchatel 

AND Emden. — State Geologist of Pennsylvania. — Senior Sec. Am. Phil. 

■ i . Soc. Philadelphia. — Prof. Geol. University of Pennsylvania. 



SECOND EDITION, ENLARGED. 



BOSTON : 

GEO. H. ELLIS, 141 FRANKLIN STREET, 

1881. 






Copyright, 1868 and 1881, 
By J. P. LESLEY. 



LC Control Number 



tmp96 026222 



PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 



Twelve years have elapsed since the appearance of the little 
book which contains the first ten of the following lectures, and the 
author still finds people now and then reading it and asking for 
its republication at a price less unreasonable than that at which 
the London edition was sold. In the present edition I have ex- 
punged the eleventh lecture, on " Arkite Symbolism," as unnecessary ; 
and have carried out the original intention of the course by adding 
six new lectures on " The Destiny of Man." 

The notes appended to the former edition are here omitted, 
because they were merely indicative of the progress made in various 
branches of science, touching the history of man, during the two 
years intervening between the delivery of my lectures and their 
publication. To continue and complete such an appendix would 
greatly swell the size of the volume ; and yet it would contain 
nothing but fresh illustrations of the general view presented, with- 
out materially modifying the integrity of the text, which is there- 
fore reprinted from the stereotype plates, with only such corrections 
as were called for by typographical errors. 

The form of lecture is condemned by critics who admire an essay 
or memoir conveying the same information and expressing the 
same opinions in essentially the same language. There is no 
good reason for this condemnation, except on the score of style ; 
and the essay or memoir must necessarily lack that ardor of feeling 
and direct insistence of argument which characterize and fortify 
the lecturer. Besides, I may frankly confess that I have neither 
time nor strength to spend on the reconstruction of the literary 
form of matter whose justification must be found in its substance. 

For seven years, since accepting the direction of the Second 
Geological Survey of Pennsylvania, I have laid aside scholarly 
pursuits, and especially those philological and archaeological studies 
which, begining in 1834, continued to be the recreations of a busy 
life till 1874. 

Of course Thave forgotten a thousand things which I would fain 
remember, and many a thread of original investigation, more or 
less promising, has been irremediably broken. Buildings stopped 



\ 



iv PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 

in the process of erection fall back into ruins ; and the scholar 
can claim no immunity from the operation of a natural law which 
sends the laggard to the rear. 

But genuine loves never die ; and the old hobbies of a student 
are installed in his affections like the statues of demi-gods in the 
niches of a temple. And life is too anxious, too wearing, a struggle 
with the actual,' not to deserve some alleviation at the hands of 
memory and fancy. The sobered soul sighs for its spent vacations, 
and hopes and listens in vain for the hour to strike which shall 
announce the beginning of leisure and the resumption of play. 

However much this work might be improved by being rewritten 
in better style, and with reference to later researches, I could 
h;_Jly hope thereby to enhance greatly its power to produce the 
effect it has already had, — the only effect ever intended for it, — 
of stimulating one class of minds by certain new suggestions, 
respecting the correlation of the physical sciences with the 
history of mankind. 

J. P. L. 

Philadelphia, August, 1881. 



PEEFACE. 



The lectures contained in this volume were written in the sum- 
mer of 18G5, at a distance from the author's notes and library. This 
will account for the paucity of special references, observable through- 
out the greater part of the book. 

When delivered in the lecture-room of the Lowell Institute, the 
following winter, they were illustrated by numerous wall pictures, 
tables of statistics, maps and diagrams of various kinds, only a few 
of which are given as woodcuts in the text. 

It is proper to add that, owing to the very judicious restriction of 
time to one hour by the rules of the Institute, not much more than 
the half of each lecture was read, except in the case of the last 
two, which occupied four evenings; the course being courteously 
extended by the honorable trustee to thirteen for that purpose. 
The twelfth lecture was, therefore, never written out, and is com- 
mitted for the present to the imagination of the reader, with the 
suggestion, that it would better justify one portion of the title chosen 
for the book than anything actually to be found between its covers. 

Circumstances made it impossible to print the lectures at the 
time they were delivered. Two years, in fact, have passed. New 
and important discoveries in archaeology have intervened. A good 
many paragraphs have been inserted, therefore, in the text, and 
numerous foot-notes added. The simplicity of the original arrange- 
ment has been lost. The separate subjects of the different lectures 
have become, to a certain extent, confused; and portions of the 
book take on the aspect of detailed discussion, suitable only to a 
scientific memoir, while other portions retain their original charac- 
ter of bird's-eye view. 

The author never contemplated anything beyond a general sketch 
of the present bearings of science upon the vexed question of the 
origin and earliest history of man. But the question has many sub- 
divisions. He intended the several lectures to be separate sketches 
of these subdivisions of the field of discussion, mere introductions 
to their proper study. His views are stated, therefore, in round 
terms. Nothing is closely reasoned out. Much is left to the log- 
ical instinct, and more to the literary education of the reader. 
Reference is everywhere made to sources of information within 



VI PKEFACE. 

easy reach of all. Even the style of an essay has been avoided. 
The book is merely a series of familiar conversations npon the cur- 
rent topics of interest in the scientific world. 

If its perusal start a single youthful mhid upon the track of an 
original investigation — as the perusal of Harcourt on the Deluge, 
twenty years ago, opened before the author a new series of combi- 
nations of the facts of history and science — or if, without any 
deeper stiidy of the facts alleged upon its pages, its general views 
insjiire a single reader with more reverence for science, less fear of 
fresh opinions, a more intelligent curiosity about forgotten things, 
which still are at their old work in the modern world, and with a 
surer faith in the growth of human happiness, the author will be 
more thcai satisfied. 

But even the mere retrospect of the labors of men of science 
upon the theme of this book has been so great a pleasure to him 
that he cannot repress the feeling that, others must enjoy it likewise. 

J. P. L. 

La Tour de Peitz, Vevay, SwiTZEBLAiO). 
Nov. 20, 1867. 



CONTENTS. 



liECTUKE PAfiB 

I. On the Classification of the Sciences, 1 

II. On the Genius of the Physical Sciences, An- 
cient AND Modern, 20 

III. The Geological Antiquity of Man, 43 

IV. On the Dignity of Mankind, . 68 

V. On the Unity of Mankind, 94 

VI. On the Early Social Life of Man, 122 

VII. On Language as a Test of Eace, 158 

VIII. The Growth of Architecture, 183 

IX. The Growth of the Alphabet, 214 

X. The Four Types of Religious Worship, .... 253 

XI. The Possible in Destiny, 295 

XII. The Destiny of Man, 301 

XIII. The Physical Destiny of the Eace, 321 

XIV. The Social Destiny of the Eace, 355 

XV. The Future Economies of Mankind, 371 

XVI. The Intellectual and Moral Destiny of the 

Race, 397 

Index, 435 



LECTURE I. 

ON THE CLASSIFICATION OF THE SCIENCES. 

In considoring h.ow I can best open tLe subject of the 
present course of Lectures^ I am reminded of a favourite 
saying of tbe greatest Lecturer tbat ever livedo and one 
whose lightest recorded thought has sunk^ with the weight 
of a great principle of truths into the consciousness of 
modern times : — 

' He that hath ears to hear, let him hear ! * 

One of the artists of New England told me that, in his 
opinion, no man could successfully paint a tree, a deer, or 
a dog, unless he first became one himself; unless he had 
pursued and been pursued ; felt the freedom of the winds 
and waters, and that intimate brotherhood and fellowship 
with living things, which sharpens every sense to the 
quick impressions of nature. Enthusiasm is the mother 
of art. 

Russell Smith, certainly the master scenist of America, 
built himself a cottage on the summit of the Alleghanies, 
in the heart of the primeval forest, and brought down 
from thence a friend, the finest elm tree in the world, 
painting it, as large as life, upon the great drop-scene of 
the Academy of Music in Philadelphia; where it still 
stands, spreading out its gigantic stem and splendid plume 
against a background of blue sky ; and every branch and 
twig and leaf of it is real, for it was drawn in love. The 
artist summered it and wintered it as his bosom friend, 

1 



2 ON THE CLASSIFICATION [LECT. 

until he knew how every vein of sap which fed it^ ran ; 
until he could distinguish the voice of its particular folia.ge 
from the whole music of that wilderness,, as a nice ear 
picks out and follows the part of some dear instrument in 
an orchestra, until he could recognize afar off every scar 
and moss-spot on it, as a lover can detect his hearths de- 
light among a thousand other beauties at a ball. Love is 
the law of knowledge ; and love is life in the beloved. 

Rosa Bonheur in the cattle-yard ; Hinckley among his 
dogs ; Church sailing through ice-bergs and drinking into 
his soul the flaming northern skies ; Espy upon his house- 
roof at Harrisburg watching live-long nights the forma- 
tion and dissolution of clouds ; Agassiz and Desor in their 
cave-house on the medial moraine watching through eight 
successive summers the motions of the glacier of the Aar; 
Hammond for eighteen months weighing his meat and drink 
to discover and explain the exact effects of whisky and to- 
bacco upon the growth and decay of the living tissues of 
the human body ; or that noble Frenchman, who, instead of 
flying, like the rest, from the mysterious plague, or fight- 
ing with it hopelessly and desperately because its nature 
was unknown, rather chose to make love to it ; took it, 
as Delilah took Samson on her lap, to shear his locks of 
demon strength; shut himself in with it; watched the 
progress of the disease in his own body ; recorded all its 
symptoms ; explained its methods of attack ; discovered 
its weak point, and gave with his dying hand to the world 
a remedy : — such men as these teach us the noblest of all 
arts — the art of Enthusiasm. 

When the thinker becomes a speaker, he becomes an 
artist. His audience can justly criticise his subject only 
as they pardon his enthusiasm by sharing in it. He intro- 
duces to your acquaintance his oldest and dearest friends — 
thoughts, which to him are great thoughts, because they 
have commanded his best years. He paints in words 
before you the scenery of his soul's home ; a mingled 
landscape, where the reason has ploughed and reaped by 
day, and the fancy loitered and listened and made love by 
night. He gives you water from a spring, the equal of 
which, he fain would have you say, exists not anywhere. 
He names you over all his orchard trees, and looks wist- 
fully to see how their fruit hits your taste. He leads you 



I,] OF THE SCIENCES. 8 

by liis well-worn paths of argument^ to points of view 
wliicli liave become tbe delight of his spirit ; seats you 
where he has sat himself a thousand times entranced^ and 
mutely begs you to worship with him before his wondrous 
Oberland. If he fails to inspire you with that delicious 
enthusiasm, he loses your friendship, and you lose his. If 
what to him are mountains of eternal truth, to you seem 
mist and fog, nothing is gained, and everything is lost; 
to you, the present effort ; to him, the entire past. The 
teacher must be believed in — for the present moment, at 
all events ; let the conclusion determine how justly. Cor- 
diality is of more avail for the discovery and appreciation 
of truth than curiosity. Only when all cried, lo Bacche ! 
together^ the god appeared. And even the Divine Lecturer 
could only tell what the world already knew or was well 
prepared to know. 

We all, no doubt, have favourite sciences. We all, no 
doubt, consider each one his own the flower and perfect 
consummation of the intellectual world. Does not the 
visible universe concentrate its glories in the individual 
eyeball ? It is only by numberless shiftings of position 
that the human mind can obtain a generous perspective of 
all truths. Each science has its own domain, and is para- 
mount lord within those limits. When it visits neighbour- 
ing potentates, it may be received with all the honours ; 
but, when seated, sits subordinate, and must hold its 
sceptre with diminished dignity. The king is the first at 
court, but the general is first in the field. And what are 
king and general but no-bodies in the laboratory of Liebig 
or Faraday ? And what are Liebig and Faraday but ex- 
press packages to the mind of Captain Anderson in an ice- 
fog ofl'the banks ? Everything in its place, — everything to 
its purpose : that is the prime law. That differentiates the 
universe, gives it living activities, intense energies, precise 
results, variety of beauties, individual worth. But all for 
each and each for all, is God^s grand spell upon his uni- 
verse, by which he marshals its forces against disorder, 
and establishes eternal harmony ; drawing slowly forth 
his silken rainbow-coloured ribbon from that mist of 
threads which hovers behind the loom. This is the charm 
of the science of the nineteenth century ; harmony in di- 
versity ; multiplicity in unity. Never was the dissection 



4 ON THE CLASSIFICATION [lECT. 

of single objects carried so far as by our special natural- 
ists ; and yet tbe dreams of tbe ancients were not so 
grandly universal as tbe panorama unrolled for contempla- 
tion and elucidation by modern pbilosophers. 

Yet there is being established^ with all this^ a real order 
of precedency among our sciences. Some of them take 
naturally a wider range than others : geology^ for instance. 
Some grow daily more and more departmental^ functional, 
and ancillary. 

The history of empires is the history of science. Their 
boundaries shift. Smaller states are absorbed into king- 
doms. On the other hand, empires which have been in- 
discreetly enlarged by an agglomeration of hostile or un- 
sympathizing nationalities, fall asunder, and out of the- 
debris are instituted separate and almost independent 
regimes. 

I will speak of Geology as illustrating both these tend- 
encies. At first it was like one of those wild tribes of Ger- 
many that conquered the Homan Empire. It was a rude, 
undisciplined study of a few of the most prominent features 
of the ground. But gathering strength as it developed 
the observing faculties, and emancipating itself from its 
aboriginal superstition of the Lusus Naturce, adopting the 
purer faith in Cause and Effect, it conquered and subju- 
gated, one by one, all the other branches of human know- 
ledge. The dukes of this new Burgundy outshone and 
outweighed their liege lords — kings and emperors. Its 
later princes — Von Buch, De Beaumont, Murchison, and 
Lyell, formed a splendid dynasty. The wealth of the whole 
world of science flowed into its public treasury. They were 
even not afraid to wage war against the world of meta- 
physics, and it seemed as though Church as well as State 
would be absorbed into one great, upstart, irresponsible 
despotism. 

But how is it now ? Geology, as an empire, exists no 
longer. Instead, we see three kingdoms: three kingdoms 
so separated, that no one who rules in the one is accounted 
of the highest authority in the other two. 1st, We have 
the science of Structural Geology, which may be said to 
represent, somewhat, the old science before it was divided. 
2nd, We have the science of Palaeontology or Fossil Geo- 
logy, which first succeeded to the power of the old empire, 



I.] or THE SCIENCES. 5 

and has for some time past been dominating^ with a touch 
of arrogance too, its structural neighbour. And 3rd^ We 
have the science of Chemical Geology, a new and rising 
state, full of enterprise^ and destined to absorb the con- 
federate states, known, in scientific parlance, by the name 
of Physics. 

And yet these three are one. Nor can a student of na- 
ture account himself well-bred unless he travels through 
them all ; although he will accomplish nothing great unless 
he naturalizes himself, and makes a home for himself, in 
only one of them. But what will not then that home of his 
become ! What a castle of intellectual strength ! What a 
cloister of various learnings ! What a museum of antiqui- 
ties ! What a rendezvous of the choicest spirits of the 
age ! 

Let me imagine myself for one moment a geologist, well 
established in such a place^ occupied with the study of the 
formation of this earthy its sedimentary and metamorphic 
and volcanic rocks, the faults it has committed, the plica- 
tions and contortions it has endured, the mineral veins 
deposited in its fissures, the organic forms it has entombed, 
its reservoirs of brine and oil, its burning mountains, its 
earthquakes, its changes of sea level, its glaciers and mo- 
raines, its golden gravel, its meteoric stones, its ossuary 
caves and deposits of worked flints, its motions through 
space, its influxes from the sun, its beginnings in eternity. 
Can any theme be more capital, more universal ? Is any 
science excluded ? Is any question impertinent ? Must I 
not subpoena everything that lives, and that does not live, 
before this case is through ? Has not every savant of the 
Academy something to tell about it ? 

The architect and civil engineer begin by relating their 
experience of the choice of granites and clays, the weight 
and strength of building materials. The miner and the 
metallurgist recount me their latest improvements in rais- 
ing, selecting, and reducing the various ores. The chemist 
hangs upon my wall his nicest table of equivalents, and 
explains me why the magnesian limestones were the first 
ones formed. The zoologist and the botanist lay upon the 
table, on each side of me, their latest enlarged and cor- 
rected synopses of fossil and recent synonym es. The Arch- 
deacon of Calcutta employs his heaviest mathematical sym- 



6 ON THE CLASSIFICATION [lECT, 

bols in weigMng- for me the plateau of Central Asia_, while 
Thompson and Hennesy are calculating the maximum and 
minimum possible thickness of the crust. With his new- 
automatic tide gauges, and with the waves produced by 
the earthquake of Simoda, Bache gets for me the mean 
depth of the Pacific, while Darwin and Dana decide, from 
the arrangement of their coral reefs, the number and direc- 
tion of its belts of alternate elevation and depression ; Sa- 
bine and De Struve report the progress they are making in 
determining the earth^s exact departure from a globular 
form. Astronomers swarm about me with their specula- 
tions upon cosmogony, and assign various reasons why the 
earth^s nucleus is hot or cold, is fluid or solid, and Avhy 
it must have sprung from the consolidation of a nebula, or 
why from the conglomeration of an infinite number of 
meteors. The Alpine Club petition for the pleasure of 
my company on their next ascent of Mont Blanc; and 
even Ruskin, the artist, insists on fixing me in a good 
light, so that I may catch the genuine bedplate lines on 
the precipices of the Arve, and never again make the ab- 
surd blunder of mistaking the cleavage of the shists for ■ 
original stratification. 

Is it any wonder that the poor geologist^s head is turned 
by so much attention ? That he accounts his own par- 
ticular science the summum bonum of truth? Yet in 
almost an equal degree may the physicist, the astronomer, 
the naturalist, the archaeologist, the metaphysician cheat 
himself with the sweet delusion, that he sits at the centre 
while others stand around. For let a soul, by purity, 
patience, and love, tame but one science, and it will have, 
like Una with her lion, the freedom of the whole forest. 

What, then, is the real order of the sciences ? Or is 
there such a thing ? Or is knowledge like a hollow sphere, 
within which the soul of man feels itself floating between 
equal attractions in all directions ? Is there any hierarchy 
of the sciences ? Is it as noble to know, as ennobling to 
determine, the number of rings constituting a genus 
among myriopoda, as it is to discover the number of 
vibrations corresponding to a given colour in the rainbow, 
or the number of formations deposited with their suc- 
cessive florae and faunae in all the ages from the Lawrentiau 
era to the present time ? Or, setting this aesthetic ques- 



I.] OF THE SCIENCES. 7 

tion on one side, can the human reason find no just ar- 
rangement of the sciences_, by which our ideas of progress 
and development may be realized, and their natural sub- 
ordination and interdependence so shown forth as to satisfy 
our love of perspective ? 

Others may answer this question in other ways. The 
remaining time, which your politeness will allow to this 
lecture, cannot perhaps be better consumed than in stat- 
ing, as clearly as I may, the order which appears most 
natural to me, when I attempt to classify the various de- 
partments of human knowledge, And I find myself in a 
manner compelled to make this preliminary statement, 
since I have chosen for the subject of the present course 
of lectures, Hhe relation of the modern sciences to the 
primeval history of man.'' 

Do not imagine, from this title, that I intend to develop 
in formal style, after the manner of the German meta- 
physicians, a history of philosophy. I willingly leave that 
immense task to the vivacious eloquence of Brdmann, 
prince of Hegelians, and to the golden pen of Whewell, 
vice-chancellor of induction. I have a much more special 
design : to show how the bonfires we have lighted and are 
feeding with fresh fuel every day, cast back their illumina- 
tion through the forest and over the moors of history; 
bringing out from the thick night and distance bizarre 
but moving forms, progenitors of our progenitors a hun- 
dred- times removed ; lighting up their savage features, 
not wholly bestial nor insane, not wholly destitute perhaps 
of some angelic or Adamic excellence; so that we may 
specify some of those earlier forms of soul to which was 
given this planet for a habitation, and be able to make out 
the original nature of many things which gibber and 
mowe at us through the dim past, as if they were super- 
natural attachments to our history, evil genii, imperti- 
nences and intrusions on the premises of our race, and 
not amenable to any exorcism except that performed with 
fasting and prayer. It is my firm belief that the time 
c<:»mes for explaining the beginnings of human life upon 
tlie earth; that if all the sciences can be brought to act 
in concert they can do much towards already setting up 
primeval archseology upon its future throne. I shall en- 
deavour to show — I am sorry I can only do it sketch- wise 



8 ON THE CIASSIFICATION [lECT. 

— ^how we can combine the results of the geologists^ the 
ethnologists^ and the linguists^ with the creations of the 
priest^ the poet, and the arcliitect, to restore and re-colour 
the faded^ broken fresco-painting of the ages on the walla 
of th.e temple of history. But to accumulate evidence we 
must examine the value of each witness. And the first step 
is to call the roll and swear them in by name and residence. 

Th.e earliest attempts to classify knowledge distinguished 
between the natural and supernaiural ; between the phy- 
sical and metaphysical ; between that which, relates to 
phenomena appreciable by the bodily senses^, and that 
which relates to tlie essence and power of things, the 
moods of intellect, and the status and intentions of Deity. 
Of the first-named distinction of the subject-matter of 
human knowledge into the natural and supernatural I 
may have occasion to speak at large in a future lecture, 
because it has been much misunderstood. The second 
distinction, viz. into physical and metaphysical, although 
it maintains its importance, in a measure, to the present 
day, is felt by every thinker to be so general and so 
vague, so indistinct in the light of modern investigations, 
that it remains in use only as a popular convenience for 
common conversation. 

The word physics, from the Greek verb fud, I grow, 
means the science of nature seen under the conditions of 
growth. But we need to introduce among the sciences of 
nature's growths the sciences of nature's /or ces, with many 
of which we have become experimentally acquainted. These 
forces are no longer considered as outside of nature, or 
above nature (metaphysical), they are no longer gods and 
demons, but laws. In fact, modern science has trans- 
ferred the name physics entirely to the discussion of this 
class of sciences, including the knowledge and use of num- 
bers and quantities. The word ' physics ' now means the 
teaching of the growth-causing agencies : light, heat, elec- 
tricity, galvanism, magnetism, gravity, &c. And the ut- 
most to which the meaning of the word is ever extended 
only takes in the application of the experimental know- 
ledge of these forces to the sub -sciences of astronomy, me- 
teorology, and geodesy. All true <pv(n's is now no longer 
discussed as ' physics,' but as ' natural history ;' the 
growth of plants; the growth of animals and man. And 



I.] OP THE SCIENCES. 9 

yet tliis growth is effected by a force wliick has not been 
enumerated among the physical forces^ and is not even 
alluded to in the science of physics proper, viz. the form 
forcOj the forma forfuans of the schoolmen; that idea of 
itself which every growing being has how it shall form 
itself in growing. This has nothing (so far as we know) 
to do with what we call mind, reason, instinct, or any of 
those fruits of brain- structure or nervous organization, 
which are the special objects of study of the intellectual 
sciences ; but underlies and antedates them ; inasmuch 
as the form-force even determines in each family, genus, 
and species of beings, whether there shall be a brain or 
not, and what rank its intelligence, reason, or instinct 
shall take. 

This living form-force is the true basis of the sciences 
of natural history, 'distinguishing them from the science of 
the imponderables, or the so-called physical forces of 
space. 

But there is also what may be called the dead form- 
force, which acts (equally beyond our comprehension) 
'through the inorganic or non-growing world, producing all 
kinds of crystals, minerals, and rocks ; determining their 
shapes also, with as despotic a decree as that which fatal- 
izes the shape of a tulip tree, or of the panther that 
stretches himself in ambush along its branches. In fact 
all the crystalline world is as much a ' growing ' part of 
nature as are the vegetable and animal kingdoms.* But 
we suppose them to grow iinder the operation of the 
purely physical forces only ; and therefore we place their 
sciences of chemistry, mineralogy, and geology, between 
pure physics and pure natural history. 

In the historical development of all the sciences lies are 
the beginnings of truth. That Helen, whose beauty set 
the world at arms, began existence in a shape so hideous 
as to be concealed for nine long months from every eye. 
Criticism then, even the criticism of love, would have 
been fatal to her. So has it been with each embryo 
science. Hidden in the ignorance of Plato and of Aristotle, 
in the so-called history of Herodotus and geography of 
Strabo, were the germs of some of our grandest sciences ; 

* See the beautiful sap-growth of Arragonite in the caves of Derby- 
shire. — Q. J. Geol, Society, Lond. xxi. 



10 ON THE CLASSIFICATION [lECT. 

ethnology, philology, sociology, theology ; the natures of 
which being nobler than those of the physical and natural 
sciences, inasmuch as they deal entirely with man, man's 
soul and God, God^'s providence and institutions for the 
future, require longer to mature, and are therefore still 
not so far advanced as they might be ; but in those early 
days they were like the Hebrew poet^'s chaos, tohu-va-bohu, 
without form and void. 

Those tales of the Makrobioi, or long-lived happy patri- 
archs ; of the Lotophagoi, nature'' s own epicures ; of Pig- 
mies and Troglodytes ; of men with tails, and men with but 
one foot, and that one large enough to be of use at noon 
for an umbrella ; of Arimaspians and cannibal Massagetes ; 
of satyrs and ogres j of Niobe and Lot''s wife, and whole 
nations turned for their pride into marble statues ; of 
DeucaHon and Pyrrha, Nimrod and the Tower of Babel, 
Cadmus and his dragon^s teeth, Pelasgus, Dorus, and 
^neas, and the numerous lying genealogies of nations, 
accepted then as all-sufficient explanations of the course 
of events preceding the times of their authors, and re- 
jected by us as figments of the imagination, — were these' 
not the faint first flutterings of the unborn and yet un- 
fashioned foetus, which has grown in course of ages to be 
that thing of strength and beauty which we name ethnology, 
the science of nations ? that queen regnant of the human 
sciences, daughter of chronology, and mother of history, 
whose two fair sisters sit at each hand of her — mythology 
and archgeology — an imperial group ! 

It is impossible not to feel that we are taking human 
studies in their natural order. First, thoughts; then, things. 
In the beginning was the Word ; then the Word was made 
flesh, and dwelt among us. We must go backward, not 
forward, to obtain the absolute ; for out of the abstract con- 
ception comes forth the concrete reality. Before the uni- 
verse was God was ; and with him dwelt the eternal and 
immutable relations of number. Mathematics and Physics 
give us the prime postulates of all creation. This is the 
group of sciences which must necessarily lead the pro- 
cession. 

Then follow the incarnations of numbers and forces in 
matter, giving us chemical and geological laws for the 



I.] OP THE SCIENCES. 11 

creation of tlie lowest and oldest^ tlie inorganic world. 
Thus we liave our second group. 

Tlien come the organic sciences as a third group^, carry- 
ing up the scheme of life to man. 

Fourthly^ we have the historic sciences ; discussing what 
man's life has been^ from his appearance on the planet 
until now. 

Then rise grave questionings — what man's life ought to 
"be. From these questionings^ begun by Pythagoras and 
Plato long ago^ and continued by philosophers of all ages^ 
a steadily thickening crowd (become at last so great that 
we may affirm with truths in this year of 1865^ that all the 
thinking men and women of Europe and America are in it)^ 
there has been elaborated a new science. Sociology, the 
doctrine of Pight Society; or, rather, a fifth group of allied 
sciences under the various names of Statistics, Finance, 
Construction, National Defence, and Equity. Each of these 
has its facts and its theories, its principles and its history 
of practice. Mankind was made gregarious ; society has 
always existed ; maniifactures, commerce, war, and law 
have always been, and must always continue to be, its four 
methods of seli-expression. No others can be named. On 
their well-collated statistics must be established all our just 
explanations of history, all our successful schemes of phi- 
lanthropy, all politics that may escape reproach. Statistics 
are the mathematics of Sociology ; and the Treadwells and 
Stephensons, the Barings and Girards, the Napoleons and 
Grants, the Blackstones and Marshalls of modem times, are 
as much men of science, if not of as high a grade, as Pascal 
and Descartes, Leibnitz and Newton, Peirce and Henry, 
Berzelius and Dumas, Owen and Agassiz, in the so-called 
world of science. To freight a Great Eastern with living- 
souls for a land of liberty is a grander achievement of the 
centuries than to transmit the price of American gold by 
submarine telegraph to the Brokers' Board in London, to 
be used in behalf of vested wrongs for back-holding the 
progress of humanity. Nor is it to be doubted for a mo- 
ment by a Boston audience, at the close of the Great Pe- 
bellion, that the Atlantis of Plato was a crude boy's dream 
compared with that splendid vision of a justified and sanc- 
tified Pepublic, founded on the experience of the Saxon 



12 ON THE CLASSIFICATION [lECT. 

race in a new world^ equipped by all ttie arts and sciences, 
instructed by Christianity^ and invested with liberty, pro- 
phesied for the last thirty years by your own immortal 
William Lloyd Garrison, and now almost fulfilled. In this 
large workshop of the Free States of America, the whole 
rolling stock of civilization is being reinvented, tested, and 
started off afresh upon the track of history. In the schools, 
and courts, and legislatures of these commonwealths, the 
social sciences are rapidly attaining that nice precision and 
that generous scope which already characterize the mathe- 
matical, the organic, and historical sciences, with all of 
which they are so closely allied. 

And now, if I have not already wearied your patience, I 
must instance still another — the last and noblest class of 
all the group of the intellectual sciences. Those which I 
have already described relate to the measurement of space 
and time, to the attributes of matter, to the growth of 
plants and animals, to mankind as part of the animal world, 
and, finally, to mankind in masses, obedient to physical ne- 
cessity and planetic circumstances. But these relate to 
Man. These teach the expressions of a supernatural na- 
ture; of a spirit which we believe to be immortal, self- 
conscious, self- studious, inventive and creative, open-eyed, 
and tongued for speech, responsive to all mysteries, and 
destined for all glories. 

The base and platform of this pre-eminent group of 
sciences is Language. Philology is the mathematics of 
the soul, teaching us the rudiments of utterance. The 
sciences of feeling are named Belles Lettres and the Fine 
Arts ; Logic is the science of thought ; Ethics the science 
01 conscience. All these are old. Modern Christianity 
has added two more to the list, the sciences of Education 
and of Philanthropy. And, to make the whole complete, 
we must end the long catalogue with the science of wor- 
ship, that is, Peligion. 

In order to refresh our memories, and keep perfectly 
distinct these differeut groups, with their elements, I have 
hung upon the wall the chart which you see before you. 
It was a scheme constructed to classify the books of a 
large and miscellaneous library. And for practical use its 
different sub-divisions or classes were distinguished by the 
primary colours of the rainbow, in their natural order from 



I.] OP THE SCIENCES. 13 

red to violet. Tiie backs of tlie books were marked with 
these colours^ and the cards on which the titles of tne 
books were separately catalogued were also of correspond- 
ing- hues. But you have probably already noticed that 
instead of six classes^ the scheme upon the wall has eight ; 
the first one^ white^ for science as such, or human know- 
ledge in the general ; the eighth one, violet, containing but 
one name, and one which I have omitted to mention in my 
foregoing remarks. It is not a science, properly speaking, 
yet. But you will all perhaps agree with me that it ought 
to be. We may, however, well despair of it when we remem- 
ber that the greatest of fools, Boswell, wrote the most de- 
Hghtful of biographies. Yet it is so far forth a science that 
it stands apart from the rest ; dealing not with mankind 
as animals, nor with mankind as a race, nor with mankind 
in society ; nor with man's life in the studio, in the lecture- 
room, or in the church ; but with men, as men ; each mortal 
by himself, sitting for his picture before the lens of Truth. 
In its intensest form, as Autobiography, it is the science of 
one's self; the summation of knowledge, for God is un- 
knowable, except as reflected in his image, man ; and 
man's individual life collates into a personal history the 
entire circle of celestial and terrestrial phenomena, mimick- 
ing like a falling raindrop the surrounding universe. 

In all ages, since the invention of letters, attempts have 
been made to immortalize the heroes and prophets of the 
world by writing out their lives ; and most of the know- 
ledge of the ancient world which remains to us, has de- 
scended in the form of biography. The pictures which 
forgotten scribes have painted of Moses, and Joshua, and 
David, and Isaiah, and the Maccabees, are among the 
most precious legacies of antiquity. What is more exciting 
than the life of Pythagoras by lamblicus ? or more delight- 
ful than Plutarch's Lives of noble Greeks and Romans who 
had lived before his day ? Tet after all that scholars can 
say of them, the biographies of the ancients were failures, 
in comparison with the best of modern times, because of 
the meagreness of ancient life, the difl&culties of inter- 
course, and above all, the narrow range of ideas, owing to 
the limited education of the writers. 

In this, pre-eminently, the difference shows itself 
between ancient and modern days. JVe skim the ocean and 



14 ON THE CLASSIFICATION [LECT. 

devour tlie land^ collecting facts by steam and transmitting 
tliem by telegraph. They consumed half their lives in a 
few snail-pace journeys and bajBSing voyages^ confined 
within the compass of a thousand miles, a prey to terrify- 
ing accidents, victims of unblushing falsehood and un- 
bounded ignorance. 

The crowd of modern travellers and writers is so great 
that every lapse from honest observation, every mistake of 
eye or ear, every inept construction, every misquotation, 
every false assumption, every distortion of word or deed 
through pride or prejudice, every failure of appreciation by 
stupidity, every undue exaggeration by affection, every 
mistake of superstition, is sure to be corrected, almost as 
soon as made. 

But in those ancient days the lonely priest went plod- 
ding on, year after year, reaching occasionally some 
monastic home where he could find a week^s or a month^s 
repose, as a rare and welcome guest from foreign lands. 
And there he heard, without the power or wish to criticise, 
extraordinary tales, incredible to modern minds. None had 
been there before him by whose judgment he could guide 
his own belief. He wrote all down. And for a century, 
perhaps for twenty centuries, no traveller would follow him 
to verify or falsify his stories. Tou see how little chance 
Sesostris, Cyrus, Zoroaster, or Lycurgus had to get their 
biographies recorded properly. But even if the truth about 
them could have been attained to, and even could we 
summon them in person before our Niebuhrs, Macaulays, 
Michelets, and Prescotts, to be cross-examined, on their 
oath and honour, would not each of them be apt to answer 
in the words of the knife-grinder : ''Lord ! Pve no tale to 
tell, sir ! ' For the manifold relations which men of m.ark 
and genius in the nineteenth century hold to all depart- 
ments of art and knowledge, constitute the chief difficulty 
in the way of writing their biographies. And at the same 
time this difficulty, well wrestled with, by men of equal 
mai^k and genius, has carried up the tone of life- writing to 
the pitch at which we have it. 

Had there been an Edward Forbes in Plutarch's day, 
we should have had a Wilson or a Geikie in Plutarch to 
describe him. For Nature is the best Quarter-master, and 
never hesitates to fill an order when it is properly red- 



I.] OF THE SCIENCES. 15 

taped. But there could be no Edward Forbes in ancient 
days for tlie same reason that there were no elephants 
nor monkeys in the Jurassic age, nor pterodactyles in the ■ 
Devonian era, nor lepidodendra in Silurian times. All 
things wait their turn. The genius of development is a 
fine scene-shifter. The Demiurge works leisurely, and 
hates to be hurried. Time is of no account, but circum- 
stance is indispensable. A perfect Biography requires a 
type Man. Men are just now beginning to write the Life 
of Jesus, because the life of Jesus holds closer relationship 
with the millennium than with the middle or the heroic 
ages, and demands for its comprehension the knowledge 
of universals, rather than particulars. The general work- 
ing of his spirit upon and within the constitution of the 
world, had to be, not tested, but testified by the experi- 
ments of twice a thousand years before its all-embracing 
applicability, its never-failing certainty, its infinite many- 
sidedness could be assented to by science. Crichton must 
visit all the courts and universities, and conquer in every 
contest of etiquette or eloquence, before he can be called 
the Admirable. And each of the centuries is itself a separate 
court and university, at which the growing humanity takes 
some new degree. 

The true science of biography is professed by the great 
novelists of the day. We see its growth in reading the 
works of Goethe, and Scott, and Thackeray, and Yictor Hugo, 
and their thousand pupils in the divinest of all arts, the 
picturing of human life. These are the teachers of the 
nineteenth century. These are the books into which have 
fallen the treasures of learning and wisdom of all the 
ages. Christianity, honour, poHteness, wit, and humour 
are taught now chiefly through novels. They are the 
mirrors in which the many-sided power of the modern 
world contemplates itself. Each man, each woman goes 
to the novel now to get such glimpses of their inner life, 
and their outward relations to nature and mankiud, as 
thrill them with emotions of pride and love, plunge them 
in remorse, lift them again with hope, confirm their fresh- 
born resolutions, and warn them against insidious dangers. 
The good that Charles Dickens has done the world is in- 
calculably great. I should rather be Charles Reade and 
have written ' The Cloister and the Hearth,' than have 



16 ON THE CLASSIFICATION [lBCT. 

been Gibbon, and have written '' The Eise and Fall of the 
Roman Empire/ One American city now is larger than 
the whole E-oman Empire was in the days of its splendour. 
We must measure matter spiritually^ to get its just dimen- 
sions. Compare Horace with Tennyson^ or Cicero with 
Sumner, or Augustus Ceesar with Abraham Lincoln, if you 
wish to see how the world has grown in the richness of its 
relationships, and how the development of man as an 
individual has kept pace with it. Barren enough would 
be, even could it be written, the biography of an aboriginal 
savage. 

How far backward we shall hereafter be able to trace 
this law of human development it would be rash for me, 
or for any other man, to say with dogmatism. Nor do I 
desire to take up the vexed question here this evening. 
The sciences which it has been the object of this lecture to 
classify are not themselves sufficiently developed to settle 
it. Mankind still wear too disagreeable a resemblance to 
their apes, the quadrumana, to argue it. From that eleva- 
tion which the Christian strives to reach, where the last 
trace of hog and tiger and baboon will leave his nature, 
and he shall rest, transfigured, at his Master's feet, and 
feel himself a worthy friend of angels — perhaps he may 
hereafter look down, without those uncomfortable emo- 
tions which even the fairest discussion of the origin of 
man gives rise to now. Enough, that so far as written 
history is concerned, and some dim glimpses into pre-his- 
toric times can be obtained, the law of human progress, of 
social, mental and moral development is a great certainty 
on which all our learned histories and philosophies are 
based; and without its clear and consistent recognition all 
reference to the early ages of mankind will be mere los- 
ing ourselves in Sorbonian bogs and Hercynian forests, 

filled with 

" Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things, 
Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimeras dire." 

It is my intention in this course of lectures to attempt 
to show how far the sciences, as they are now advanced, 
succeed in throwing light upon the early history of our 
race. I do not know that I need make any apology for 
the choice of this subject in preference to one more strictly 



I.] OP THE SCIENCES. 17 

professional : although, it is by no means, in the language 
of the world, a useful one. But I feel sensibly the tend- 
ency of our times to utilitarianism and materialism. I 
think it is wise sometimes to shut up shop and walk in the 
twilight, and look up at the stars, or down upon the sea. 
The end and object of all science is, not to print calicoes, 
but to brighten up the face of man. And if the thought 
of ages long ago can breed within the human heart one 
sentiment of pious contentment with its lot, or one hope 
of future happiness, or any increase of that faith which 
believes that all things are well ordered and sure, and work 
together for the good of those that love God, — that 
thought of ages long gone by is useful. 

But the mere attempt to reconstruct the past is favour- 
able to our knowledge of the present. In no way can we 
better judge of tools than by building with them. I pur- 
pose in this course of lectures to test the temper of our 
sciences to see if they will break on one of the hardest of 
all subjects of discussion. In doing this we will pass in 
review, as it were, their capabilities. This of itself will 
well repay our time. 

The chief charm of all such subjects as the one I have 
chosen lies in a sort of super-naturalism which floats 
about them like a haze ; tinting them purple and gold as 
the air at sunset tints the distant mountain- tops. In our 
daily life we feel the hardness and roughness of matter 
until our souls are sore and faint. But when we turn to 
the far distant past we feel this hard and rough material 
world melting and mixing with strange fancies, pliant 
laws, conjectural processions of events, cloudy possibili- 
ties, and over all the bending form and earnest face of 
the All-Father at His work. So sang the old Hebrew 
bard : — ^I am Sophia; I am the abstract wisdom; I was 
with Him in the beginning, when He laid the foundations 
of the earth, and the morning stars shouted for joy.^ 

The ancient histories, like the primary rocks of the 
North, are all rounded and pohshed and streaked and 
beautified by the slow movements of the Recent over them. 
We may find columbines here and there blooming in their 
rifts. 

It does us good to cultivate the grand superstitions 
which are indigenous to that mountain-land. What is 

,2 



18 ON THE CLASSIFICATION [lECT. 

superstition but tlie posture of the human soul when it 
stands erect and treads brute matter under foot. We talk 
of our ^w^c^er- standings : Yes — but what of our over-stand- 
ings ? We men of science of the nineteenth century are 
becoming too exclusively men of understanding. ' I 
will speak/ said Paul, ^ I will speak with the understanding 
and the spirit also.' 

All I would say in this introductory lecture is this : that 
I do not believe in a beginning without God, any more 
than in an end without Christ; and therefore you may ex- 
pect to hear me treat all the parts and details of the in- 
vestigation into the early life of mankind on the earth_, not 
only by the rules of the Naturalist,, but also in the spirit 
of the Spiritualist ; and with a profound faith in Christi- 
anity as the blooming of the century-plant. 

The modern sciences conspire to prove that man is an 
animal, and that his history is bound up with the zoolo- 
gical developments of the remotest geological times. But 
this does not injure the discussion of his spiritual faculties 
and his immortal future. 

The sciences agree in impressing us with man's subjec- 
tion to the physical laws which are so despotic over all 
other departments of nature. But this need not blind our 
eyes to the function of the Will ; to the laws of right and 
wrong ; the reality of responsibility, and the alliance of 
the soul with superior natures, unseen as well as seen. 

The sciences enjoy together a code of criticism, which 
they make obligatory upon the student of the past ; a code 
too little known, too long neglected by the students of the 
past. By this criticism we will find all written history 
false or defective ; and all human language so overcharged 
with the effete decomposition of ancient ideas and prac- 
tices, as to make philology rather a barrier against, than 
an avenue towards, the knowledge of antiquity. But on 
the other hand, is that to overthrow our faith in the 
sublime traditions which we have from those old times ? 
The light of antiquity streams into our Church of the 
Present through wonderful stained windows — and is all 
the more ravishingly beautiful, and quite as useful for all 
that. While we learn that no ancient Scripture is to be 
believed, — we learn also that all ancient Scripture is to 
be believed. When we turn towards the future we see as 



I.] OF THE SCIENCES. 19 

tlirougli a glass darkly^ but still we see ; and all thebetterby 
tlie nearer we bring our eyes to tbe glass that stops our 
vision. So when we turn towards that other eternity^ the 
past, we see as through a glass darkly, but still we see ; 
and all the better for the criticism which has been reduced 
to such perfection by the labours of men of science in our 
day. 

I repeat then, that for the truthful and useful discussion 
of the relations of the modern sciences to the early history 
of man, it is necessary for your lecturer to believe as pro- 
foundly in the essential and indestructible principles of the 
Christian religion as in the axioms of Euclid or the law of 
chemical equivalents. Nor has the slow progress of the 
sciences of geology and comparative anatomy done more 
to retard our knowledge of primeval antiquity, than has 
the unchristian state of the theological and social sciences. 

In my next lecture I will illustrate the difference be- 
tween the ancient forms of knowledge and our modern 
sciences ; and show how impossible it is, without the help 
of a cultivated fancy, to investigate the natural history of 
an age of human existence, over which an uncultivated 
fancy bore entire sway. 

In the third, the fourth, and the fifth lectures of the 
course, I will treat of the antiquity, the dignity, and the 
unity of the human race. I will devote the sixth lecture 
to the social life of the ancients. The seventh lecture will 
be on the origin of language. The eighth on the origin 
of taste and the development especially of architecture. 
In the ninth I will give you my theory of the origin of 
letters ; the invention of the alphabet ; and the nature of 
those spiritual fancies which became concrete in the 
mythological traditions of the world. My tenth lecture 
will treat of the religious instinct, and its embodiment in 
ceremonial worships. The eleventh will be devoted to what 
I consider the most ancient symbolism of the priesthood. 

If I make my views clear to an audience so exacting of 
precision and completeness as this is sure to be, it will be 
more than I dare to hope. But at all events I can give 
you some faint sketch of the expanse of the knowable 
which lies before the soul that reverently and lovingly un- 
dertakes to question Heaven and Nature about the begin- 
ning of its kind. 



LECTUEE II. 

ON THE GENIUS 0¥ THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES, ANCIENT AND 
MODEEN. 

In the last lecture I gave you a classification of the 
modern sciences in eight groups, the first group represent- 
ing science in the general; and the second group com- 
prising the mathematical, exact or physical sciences proper. 

My lecture this evening should show you the relations 
of this second group to the early history of man. In other 
words, should answer the question, how much information 
the mathematicians, the astronomers, the meteorologists, 
the geodesists, or physical geographers, and the students 
of light, heat, electricity, motion, &c., can give us respect- 
ing the planting of human society upon the earth. 

Not much. ISTo ! not much. But yet a little. 

Before I recount this little, I have something more, in- 
troductory, to say respecting the right which modern 
science has to speak at all upon this subject ; a right, as 
you are probably well aware, denied ; denied by the pul- 
pit; I mean, of course, by the uneducated and more ig- 
noble part of the pulpit. For science has already won 
stalwart champions from among the clergy ; and we less 
seldom now are forced to listen to those storms of mingled 
arrogance, absurdity, and bad taste, which formerly made 
of the pulpit a very cave of Eolus ; those discordant de- 
nunciations of dangerous novelties, through the loud up- 
roar of which were ever to be more easily distinguished 
than any other sounds the warning words of Paul to 
Timothy : ' Keep that which is committed to thy trust, 
avoiding profane and vain babblings and oppositions of 
science falsely so called, which some professing, have erred 
concerning the faith.^ 

A thorough-bred and noble-minded theologian will scorn 



ON THE GENIUS OP THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES. 21 

to turn against Mmself this beautiful apostroplie of the 
pliilosopliic and great-minded apostle^ tliis wide and ten- 
der appeal to tlie fresh heart of Christianity to keep itself 
from the . intellectual idols of that day^ the demoralizing 
sophisms of Athens, and the crazy Gnosticism of Antioch 
and Alexandria; — against his own inner life; against 
the education of the 19th century ; against these ennobling 
and refining sciences which have been born of Christianity 
in her best estate and glorify her on earth as the spotless 
robes of her elect will glorify her in the heavens. • 

Let us comprehend, then, before we go one step further 
in this course^, the difference between the so-called science 
of the ancients^ of which Paul spoke, and the sciences of 
modern times, which he knew nothing about. 

They differ in two respects, the most essential possible : 
1, In their genius, or animus ; 2, In their method, or ap- 
paratus. 

1. The genius, or animus, of the ancient science was 
essentially fanciful ; childish ; cared little for consistency ; 
was inexperienced; preferred to believe; was impatient 
of criticism; had no purpose in its investigations ; no use 
for their results. 

The spirit of modern science is just the contrary; — 
practical and manly ; at once critical and comprehensive ; 
more disposed to deny than to affirm; insists upon all 
things being put upon their trial ; rejects even truth her- 
self if she stammers before the court ; cross-examines 
without pity; insists upon absolute consistency ; is regard- 
less of consequences ; takes nothing for granted ; worships 
cause and effect ; investigates always in the light of some 
hypothesis, and applies every discovery instantly to use. 

2. In the second point, of Method, the difference is 
equally patent to observation. The method employed of 
old was as fanciful as the spirit. The only intellectual 
tool above the level of their senses, which the ancients had 
to work with, was their quick and fertile imagination. 
With this they reasoned. Their powers of observation 
were fine, but they neither knew what to look for nor how 
to correct false observations, nor how to combine what 
they knew, so as to frame laws by which to carry on the 
work. What little they got, the most of it was worthless ; 
and what was valuable they soon lost. There was no con- 



22 GENIUS OP THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES, [lECT. 

cert among their sages. They waslied the gravely but 
could not crush the quartz. They merely worked the 
out-crops of knowledge, because they had neither engines 
for deep minings nor railways to take away the ore, nor 
furnaces wherein to bring the metal to natnre, nor labora- 
tories for assaying its purity. They wrote books, but 
there were no reviewers. In a word, true science was as 
impossible a product of the human mind so long as the 
fancy fished and hunted through its primeval wilderness, 
as commerce and luxury and art are impossible until the 
invention of the axe, the plough, the anvil, and the loom 
cause the physical forest to disappear with its wild deni- 
zens, and farmers, artisans, and townsmen to take their 
place. 

The whole story is told in one sentence, when we say 
that modern science replaces Fancy by Experiment. Its 
whole profession is inquisitorial. It tortures the dumb 
truth. To say what you can prove is the only passport to 
its favour. None of your suppositions, is the only response 
it deigns to give the sciolist. It is harder on contractors 
than any army-inspector at Springfield. It cares for no 
expense in renewing and improving its machinery, and 
keeps selling off its coudemued material to charlatans. 
^Be sure you are right; then go ahead,^ is its favourite 
saying. It may wink at the fancies or inaccuracies of a 
favourite over-night, but woe be to him in the morning ! 
With its whole soul modern science hates idols — those 
that Lord Bacon classified, and all others, — and despises 
hero worship. It encourages predictions as stimulants, 
but murders the prophet whose vision comes not to pass ; 
yet it has great patience when the prophecy is both very 
new and very grand. 

You will notice then that the great distinction between 
ancient and modern science is this : that the former was 
the product of undisciplined fancy, and the latter is the 
product of careful, repeated, and systematic experiment ; 
simply the difference between conjecture and hnoivledge. 
For fancy and experiment are the two poles on which the 
world of human knowledge turns. Or, to change the 
simile, fancy is the steam which lifts the piston-rod of 
intellectual progress ; experiment, the guides in which it 
moves. 



II.] ANCIENT AND MODERN. 23 

Now let me apply these ideas to the first member of the 
group of mathematical sciences with which wo are dealing 
to-night; the science of numbers. It affords us a fine 
illustration of the difference between ancient and modern 
science. I do not speak just now of the aboriginal ideas 
of numbers which the earliest tribes of men obtained in 
their savage state. I shall speak of that directly. And I 
use the term '' ancients ' in its common sense^ meaning the 
classical ancients, of whose life and doings we have some 
traditional history. 

The ancients invented arithmetic and geometry, but the 
moderns have possessed themselves of that all-powerful 
apparatus of investigation, the differential calculus. The 
ancients had a fanciful or superstitious reverence for num- 
bers, believing them to embody an occult and fearful magic, 
according to which the universe was originally created, and 
under the influence of which all life was thought to move. 
The moderns love numbers, because by them they can work 
out in a reasonable and precise manner both the darkest 
and the noblest problems of creation — the distance of the 
stars, the weight of the planets, the velocity of light, the 
composition of matter, the progress of population, the rate 
of insurance on life and property.* The mathematics of the 
ancients could produce nothing higher than astrology ; 
that of the moderns has produced astronomy, meteorology, 
geodesy. Its last and crowning triumph has been the 
establishment of the law of the ' convertibility of forces,^ 
by which we now know that not the smallest portion of the 
universe is ever lost ; that motion, when it stops, becomes 
so much light and heat ; that light and heat, when they 
distribute themselves, supply to nature an equal quantity 
of electricity or galvanism ; that galvanism becomes mag- 
netism; and that magnetism gives place again to motion. 
Did St Paul mean to say that all this is ' science falsely so 
called''? Is this the yz^oocrts that he denounced so vehe- 
mently, as opposing itself to all that Jesus Christ had given 
him to hold in trust until he should come again to judge 
the world in righteousness ? I trow not. 

Let me call up before your imagination that great vision 

* The truthfulness, the reverence of exact statement and description, 
which distinguishes the occidental from the oriental man, may be deduced, 
perhaps, rather from this influence than from any other source. 



24 GENIUS or THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES, [lECT. 

wliicli stood to tlie ancient plailosopliic world for tlie sum 
of all speculation upon the way God made tlie worlds. It 
was tlieir yycoo-t? ; tlie doctrine of tlie Gnostic or Oriental 
world. I leave you to judge yourselves liow much science 
there was in it ; and how wisely, seeing its intense, proud, 
irreconcilable opposition to the Gospel of Christ, Paul 
warned his followers not to be seduced from their holy 
faith by it. In one form or other the whole mathematico- 
physical science of the ancient world consisted in this cos- 
mogony. It stated its fanciful principles thus : — 

1. That matter and spirit are the two hostile elements of 
the universe. 

2. That there can be no intimate intercourse between 
the Absolute, pure spirit, God, and the Material, gross, 
vile, sin-producing, chaotic, rebellious, and insane stuff out 
of which bodies are made. 

3. That therefore the universe must have resulted from 
the existence and operations of energies or intelligences 
holding an intermediate place between the Absolute and 
the Material, filling up or bridging over the awful chasm 
between God and Matter. 

Upon these assumptions, and this comprehensive syllo- 
gism, a thousand fanciful philosophers erected their cos- 
mogonies ; like the cathedrals of the middle ages, all dif- 
ferent, but all belonging to one style ; some smaller and 
plainer, others imposing for their immensity, bewilderingly 
complicated, and covered over with elaborate ornamenta- 
tion. The central idea of all of them was that of emana- 
tion. Eons came forth from the Divine essence as deftly 
and numerously various as ribbons from a juggler's mouth. 
Down slid the long Jacob's ladder, with an angel or arch- 
angel standing upon every rung, until its foot touched 
and rested firm upon the mass of crudity to be informed. 
High at its summit stood, waving her wings, the Celestial 
Sophia, and at its foot the Demiourgos or Creator of the 
earth, the Jewish Jehovah, with face downcast, and brawny 
arms, the Terrestrial Sophia always by his side. And this 
was the most advanced philosophical statement of the 
origin of men and things that the science of the ancients 
ever succeeded in making ; and modern science can detect 
in it neither rhyme nor reason, because it was neither based 
on observation, nor calculation, nor experiment. 



II.] ANCIENT AND MODERN. 25 

Let me set before you now another and far different 
picture. That was ' science falsely so called ; ' this is 
true science. It may not be scientific truths for its de- 
monstration has not yet been completed. But it is true 
science for all that ; because it is the product of a Fancy 
disciplined^ mathematical^ experimental^ and observant. 
I allude of course to the Nebular Hypothesis. 

The Nebular Hypothesis is to us modern naturalists 
what the gnostic cosmogonies were to the cabbalists of 
yore, and is illustrated in a perfect manner by the genius of 
modern science. It has swelled rapidly to its present pro- 
portions by insensible degrees ; by yearly accessions of 
facts, discovered and recorded in the different departments 
of inquiry. Its constitution is purely mathematical. 
Grant its one postulate, — That space was originally full of 
homogeneous matter obedient to the laws of physics — and 
its whole argument follows logically to the close ; and it 
accounts for everything we see and know about the visible 
world. And this first postulate is strictly reasonable ; 
even if it turn out in the end not to have been true ; for 
1, It agrees with all experimental observation as thus far 
made ; and 2, It is based upon a set of observations of its 
own. I mean the observations of telescopic nebulEe. 
Nor can it be finally disproved and laid aside until more 
powerful telescopes shall have been made to resolve into 
separate stars the last remaining nebula. And even then 
the 0- i^nor-i possibility stands good. Saturn^s rings will 
continue to discuss the question with any comet that may 
happen to drop in. 

Emanation was the genius of the old cosmogony ; 
Evolution is the genius of the nebular hypothesis. It 
paints the universe as either at first created an infinite 
mist of unequally distributed elemental atoms ; or else as, 
at stated intervals, becoming such. It sees great move- 
ments beginning, or re-beginning, in this unformed but 
living infinite ; centres of growing aggregation ; and tend- 
encies towards those centres. It calculates the conse- 
quences of these tendencies, and proves that great gyra- 
tions must result from them. It shows how the laws of 
heat will bring about consolidation ; and how the laws of 
motion will effect at first a ring and then a planetary 
system, m each vortex, throughout infinite space. Thus 



26 GENIUS OP THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES,, [lECT. 

stars and suns, nebulae and comets, earths and their satel- 
lites, appear upon the scene; each with its proper 
motions j each destined to work out a diflferent history, 
according to its circumstances. Then it takes up our 
solar system, and calculates, and weighs, and keeps per- 
petual watch upon it. It suspects the existence of an 
extra member of the system, and by pure dint of numbers 
finds it. l^t proves the molecular discreteness of Saturn^s 
rings, and the aqueous character of the envelopes of 
Jupiter and Mars. It invents the thermo-electric pile, and 
proves that the sun's spots are not so hot as the rest of 
its face, and that the body of the moon is as utterly cold 
as space itself. It invents the spectroscope, and makes 
out with it five of our metals in the sun, and two of them 
in Sirius. Then it takes up our earth, and shows how 
once it more than filled the entire orbit of the moon, first 
throwing ofi" a ring which became our moon, and finally 
condensing to its present form, a globe of lava, with a 
crust of rock, a skin of water, and an envelope of air. 
It sketches out the story of this crust: how its first flakes 
emerged and joined, and were re- enforced and thickened 
from below, compressed, turned up, re-melted and re-form- 
ed : how a steady torrent of hot acid waters rained down 
constantly upon all portions of this forming crust, disin- 
tegrating it as fast as it was consolidated, and flying np 
again in steam, to carry off its heat into surrounding 
space : how in due course of time the seas became cool 
enough to retain both their waters and the alkaline and 
acid sediments which they brought into it : how the 
chlorates and carbonates of the land changed partners 
when they reached the sea, and formed the salt which 
gives it sweetness, and the dolomite which made its an- 
cient bed : and how, as time went on, changing the pro- 
portions and relations of terrestrial elements, form after 
form of life appeared, each suitable to the exact amount of 
heat or cold, of light or darkness, moisture or drought, 
acidity or alkalinity of its place of birth, and changing then 
to something else, or something better, when it could no 
longer live a life conformable to its own nature ; each form 
superior to the one preceding it ; until at last man came, 
to find a world grown firm enough to live on, cooled to the 
temperate point, soiled, shaded, lighted, watered properly. 



II.] ANCIENT AND MODERN. 27 

sprinkled witli gold and precious stones, inlaid with iron 
and brass, and floating tlirougli wliat is to liim a finislied 
universe. 

Have we not liere a procession of realities, wiiere before 
we had a mist of dreams filled with the fantastic gibbering 
of ghosts ? That is just the distinction between the ancient 
Gnosis, and, in a less degree, all ancient knowledge, and 
the modern sciences. 

Let me now turn your attention to the same strong con- 
trast between ancient and modern thought which the prac- 
tical application of these cosmological views exhibit. I 
mean the application of the . old Gnostic theories to the 
practice of astrology, and the applications of modern astro- 
nomical science to the discovery of the laws of climate, to 
the practice of navigation, and to the measurement of land, 
forming what we call the sciences of Physical Geography, 
Navigation, Geodesy, and Civil Engineering. 

The essential element of the contrast still is, that the one 
is a system of fancy, the other a system of facts. The one 
exercised habitually a cruel power over the lives of men by 
its claims to magic ; the other blesses mankind, not only 
with the purest lessons of universal law and order, but with 
comfort in the house, and safety on the sea. 

Take a well-known example from the history of the 
founding of the Christian Church. In the Acts 'of the 
Apostles we read that, at Ephesus, an uproar threatened 
the best part of its citizens with fire and sword for doubt- 
ing that the stone, which the worst part worshipped, fell 
from Jupiter. It would be hard to raise a riot now-a-days, 
in Washington, by any story our astronomers could tell 
about the great ring-meteorite which forms the central ob- 
ject of attraction in the Museum of the Smithsonian Insti- 
tution. Chauncey Wright calculated that five millions of 
these bodies strike the outer stratum of our atmosphere 
every day ; and that the major part of them, di-iven by 
their own or the eartVs velocity to various depths in it, 
are triturated, smelted, evaporated, distributed by the 
winds, and slowly settle to increase the size of the earth. 
An occasional larger mass, becoming incandescent only on 
its outside, throws off a cloud of volatilized matter as it 
passes through the atmosphere, and then resumes its dark, 
cold flight through space — space that is full of such. Now 



28 GENIUS OP THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES, [lECT. 

and then one liits tlie earth, in its orbit so fairly that it 
succeeds in reaching the bottom of the atmosphere, and 
buries itself in the soil, or in the broad expanse of the 
ocean. In the old days of astrology men would have built 
a temple over it, and organized a priesthood for its worship, 
and regulated j)olitics by its magnetic auguries ; but in our 
days of astronomy, the finder cuts it up into pieces and 
sells them for five dollars a-piece, to be labelled and stowed 
away in cabinets with bottled tarantulas, Indian arrow- 
heads, and coprolites from the chalk. 

One perhaps is powwowed over at a meeting of the 
Meteorological Society, where an interesting paper is read 
by Mr A. on the observed height, length, direction, ve- 
locity, and luminousness of the meteor^s flight, as seen 
from half-a-doze3i small villages in difi'erent parts of the 
country; and another piece may form the subject, per- 
haps, at a meeting of the Chemical Society, of an equally 
instructive paper by Mr B., showing the probable consti- 
tution of the meteor, from a careful analysis of the frag- 
ment ; disclosing the presence of so much iron, so much 
nickel, so much schreibersite, with remarkable traces of 
cai-bon; suggesting the possible existence of unknown 
organisms, whether animal or vegetable the author cannot 
say, upon the planetic body of which this meteor seems to 
have formed a part. A third perhaps goes over to Vienna, 
where, at a meeting of the Imperial Academy, the vener- 
able Herr Hofirath Haidinger draws attention to certain 
impressions, as it were of human fingers, in the at-one- 
time plastic mass, but only at one end, and shows that the 
end so marked must have been the backside of the meteor 
as it flew, behind which, as in a ship's wake just abaft the 
rudder-post, an eddy of incandescent air and gases had 
been formed, reducing the metal to plasticity and leaving 
upon it these impressions ; at the same time he shows how 
th.e solid banking up of the air in front of this frightful 
projectile must have brought its forward career to a sud- 
den stop, when the eartVs gravity would take effect and 
bring it, almost at a right angle, to the ground. 

Such are the two different ways in which ancient and 
modern science would treat the objects of science, show- 
ing always the same preponderance of a helpless and 
therefore fearful fancy on the one side, and of a bold and 



II.] ANCIENT AND MODERN. 29 

powerful criticism on tlie otlier. The iLuman race was 
placed upon tlie earth at the same disadvantage through 
ignorance which prevents a traveller from sleeping the 
first night he spends in a strange inn. The human heart 
grows timid in the dark^ while familiarity with the obscure 
breeds contempt. The human race regard old heathen 
terrors now with the same nonchalance with which a 
family born under its roof hear noises in a haunted 
house j or rather with that staunch, earnest^ watchful in- 
telligence with which an engine-driver walks round and 
round his well-regulated and thoroughly comprehended^ 
yet tremendous machine. 

You will not of course mistake my meaning so far as 
to imagine that I contrast the ancient and the modern 
worlds ! I am only contrasting the ancient gnosis with 
modern science. Superstitions of the lowest kind still 
fill the earth. I speak of the genius of the learned world. 
The same uncultivated fancy keeps alive in our day^ among 
the uneducated classes and races of men^ astrological and 
all other ancient absurdities. They float daily to us across 
the Atlantic^ like cloud-rack, to be absorbed and made to 
vanish in the clear, dry intellectual air, which, thank God, 
we were born to breathe. The education of the world as 
a whole has hardly yet commenced. It might well strike 
us wath astonishment to see a iuell-ednc£i.te3. world fight- 
ing for slavery instead of for liberty, reeling with drunk- 
enness, reeking with squalid vice, roaring with obscene 
profanity, as so much of ours does ! No, we are simply 
considering the contrast between the intellectual condition 
and habits of the philosophic world as it existed a few 
thousand years ago, with what its intellectual habits are 
now ; and what is the actual Christian value of the science 
of nearly the entire population of these Northern States, of 
Scotland, Switzerland, and Prussia, of the upper classes 
in England, France, and Italy, and in fact of the wealthy 
everywhere. 

About six months ago a letter, addressed to me in Bos- 
ton, reached me, I know not by what means, through the 
Ofiice in Philadelphia. It had been written by some 
motherly body down in Maine, and enclosed an old one- 
dollar bill. It gave the hour and minute of the woman^s 
birth, and begged me to return the horoscope in diagram. 



30 GENIUS OP THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES,, [lECT. 

witb. the prediction founded on its figure. And in a 
touching little postscript, as badly spelled and written as 
tlie letter itself, slie added tlie birth-date of her favourite 
son, and begged me to include his fortune in her own. 

Now it is a very curious question : on what principle the 
notion of the government of human fortune hy the stars 
could have been so early, widely, and permanently estab- 
lished. The idea of cause and effect, or of antecedence 
and consequence, not to go into its metaphysical dis- 
cussion, seems inherent in intelligence. Even the lower 
animals exhibit it. The reason why our ponies are alarmed 
at wheelbarrows and dummy engines is evidently because 
they cannot comprehend how anything can go unless it be 
preceded by a horse. They seem to be infected with the 
same horror of the prodigious which we would tremble 
under were we to observe St Denis marching off from 
martyrdom with his head under his arm. Our savage an- 
cestors never became intellectually reconciled to an eclipse 
of the sun or of the moon because they could suggest no 
benevolent cause for it ; it seemed to them like some 
deadly swooning of a father or a mother, threatening 
themselves with orphanage. The worship of the heavenly 
bodies must have borne exact proportion to the daily and 
nightly benefits they bestowed upon mankind. At the 
equator the sun was an enemy, at the poles a friend. The 
Aiab addressed his praises to ' the great rock in a weary 
land ' because it protected him from the solar rays. The 
Scandinavian, on the contrary, watched the declining sun 
from June to December with undisguised anxiety, erected 
slanting dolmens to detect the first certainty of its ap- 
proaching return ; and when assured that its face was once 
more set towards their habitations, over which their enemy 
the snow had already begun to heap itself, they dragged 
the yule log to the hearth, and danced and sang and drank 
the grand carouse of all the year, making the frozen air 
resound with their Christmas carols under the mistletoe, 
long before Christ was born, or a mass had ever been said 
in honour of the Sun of Eighteousness. The celebrated 
contest between sun-worship and pyramid- or water-wor- 
ship which characterized a part of the monumental history 
of Egypt was a conflict of sentiment between the equatorial 
and the polar zones, the iconoclastic sun-worshippers 



II.] ANCIENT AND MODERN. 31 

coming into the valley of the Nile from the mountains of 
Armenia and the distant steppes of Scythia^ at the close of 
the 14th* dynasty, 2000 years more or less B.C., as they did 
again under Cambyses about the year 500 B.C., and again, 
to take permanent possession, as the Turks of the 13th f 
century of the Christian era, long after the old sun-worship 
had been exchanged for the rational religion of Mahommed. 

In like manner the worship of the moon must have 
sprung from that dependence on her lovely light which was 
inevitable in an age of forests, when men had neither 
lamps nor clocks to live by, and were surrounded by such 
wild beasts as bows and arrows could do little to offend, 
lions and tigers, hyenas, auroxen, and the great horned 
Irish elk, wolves and wild boars, and the immense cave 
bear, the elephant, and the rhinoceros. 

Without the waxing and waning moon man would have 
taken no account of time ; no weeks, no months, nothing 
but the long cycle of the year. The idea of sequence was 
bound up with the moon ; she became the goddess of or- 
der, made story-telling possible, and lovers^ assignations, 
and parliaments. On the worship of the moon the whole 
Druidic system of law, as well as ceremonial, leaned ; and 
when its canons were abrogated and its usages were sup- 
pressed by Christianity, they still continued to exist as 
popular superstitions. The majority of farmers, to this 
very day, regulate their planting and felling of timber, 
their pruning and grafting, by the phases of the moon ; 
while their wives in the kitchen would find all their yarn 
untwist, and all their soap go back, unless they consulted 
the almanac. 

In one or two instances modern experimental science has 
actually reinforced the ancient superstitious observance of 
the moon. It is now well understood that young plants, 
like human babies, must have plenty of rest. If they shoot 

* Mariette (Aperpu, &c., 1867) accounts for the lack of monuments of 
the 15th and 16th dynasties by the invasion of the Hyksos. Bunsen 
agrees that they came in with the 4th king of the 13th dynasty, but they 
did not become legitimate sovereigns until the 17th dynasty. See Renan, 
quoted below at the begiiming of the 6th lecture.) The actual solar disc 
fanatic who did the mischief was ATin-aten, who followed Thutmosis I. 
of the 17th dynasty, his mother being a foreigner. — Indigenous Races, 
Gliddon, 1857, p. Il6. 

t The Turkish dynasty of Ottoman sultans commenced in 1258. 



32 GENIUfa OP THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES^ [LECT. 

up from the seed in the waning of the moon they enjoy 
the repose of long^ dark nights ; if in the growing moon, 
their young life^ over-stimulated^ perishes^ or suffers dete- 
rioration more or less. The latest observations make it cer- 
tain that the sun-heat reflected from the full-moon^ s face is 
sufficient to dispel clouds^ and it must modify, therefore, 
notably the climate of the kitchen-garden. One of the 
most brilliant astronomical discoveries of the last ten years 
is that of the so-called Eleven- Year Cycle, during which 
Jupiter and the other planets alternately collect upon one 
side of the sun, and then at other times disperse themselves 
around it; producing, in the one case, an abundant supply 
of spots upon the sunn's disc, with a corresponding lowering 
of the climate of the earth ; and, in the other case, the dis- 
persion and disappearance of spots, and a higher mean 
temperature for the earth. 

These are merely instances showing how the instinct of 
man may sometimes anticipate the final deductions of his 
reasoning faculties ; and we are thus taught to despise 
nothing, not even the follies of superstition. 

Still less ought we to despise the ancient worships of the 
sun and moon, inasmuch as our own notorious irreligion is 
due to an insensibility to the benefits which we receive all 
the time and on all sides from Nature, caused by our mo- 
dern mastership of Nature. The slave-holder feels no gra- 
titude to his sl^ve ; the magician cannot worship the devils 
who do his bidding ; therefore I have always thought that 
the poet only showed his ignorance of human nature and of 
the tendencies of natural science, when he wrote — ^The 
undevout astronomer is mad ! ' Ignorance has always been 
the mother of devotion. The man who can hold the solar 
system in his fist, and measure and weigh it with his scale 
and compasses, and predict with accurate certainty what 
its changed aspect will be a hundred thousand years be- 
yond the term of his own appointed career upon the earth 
— ^this man may worship his wife, his emperor, his coun- 
try's flag, his science, justice and honour, and the Great 
God of the invisible universe ; but certainly not any hea- 
venly object, nor even God on account of the mere wonders 
of His sky. 

But in old times it was not so. The procession of planets 
went on to and fro with the mystery and grandeur of a 



II.] ANCIENT AND MODERN. 33 

procession of priests ; and was so worshipped. The myste- 
rious pole-star was the savage man^s best friend^ and the 
sailor's also. The dog-star^ rising as the sun went down, 
just when the blessed inundation of the Nile promised a 
harvest for the coming year, came in of course for a large 
share of Egyptian love and* reverence. Shepherds of 
Persia and Arabia had nothing else to do, whole nights, 
whole years, whole lifetimes, but to watch and wonder at 
the many-coloured, slowly- shifting stars. They saw the 
satellites of Jupiter without a telescope ; and by dividing 
up a few hundred revolutions of each satellite by the num- 
ber of nights of observation, they could arrive at its rate 
of motion to a minute of time. The strange diversity of 
names given to the constellations, the utter absefice of 
any harmonious system in the zodiac or out of it, the 
purely fanciful and oftentimes inexplicable groupings of 
the principal stars, all go to show how many minds in 
how many ages helped the old astrology to assume the 
shape in which Ave know it now. 

Comets were a terror to the ancients because their 
shape suggested wax*, and their flaming glare pestilence, 
rushing through the sky like warriors with dishevelled 
hair, and always at some epoch of convulsion, either 
during the invasion of some bloody conqueror, or at the 
death of some great leader. Yolcanoes were, for the same 
reason, or rather by the construction of the same unin- 
structed fancy, made the abodes of malignant deities, per- 
sonifications of those forces of nature not yet subjugated 
by man's intellect. High mountain-peaks, the inaccessible 
thrones of ice and snow, sources of thunder and lightning, 
avalanches, and devastating floods, became the homes of 
other gods, the enemies rather than the friends of man. 
But, above all, the all-devouring ocean inspired terror in 
the human breast, and this terror generated some of the 
widest-spread superstitions connected with the ancient 
mythologies. Serpent-worship and Siva-worship and 
devil-worship in general can be distinctly traced to it, as 
I will show in a future lecture. The ship which carried 
man, and the stars which guided him across the trackless 
sea, became personified into his favouring* deities, and 

* 'If, most venerable man! it is a disgrace and sin to forget God, it 
is also a stain upon the virtue, and a dishonour upon the judgment, of 
\ 3 



34 GENIUS OF THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES^ [lECT. 

thus astrology linked itself with physical geography, as 
astronomy has done in our day to" much better purpose. 

Let me touchy in passing, upon the curious etymology of 
the word ^star/ It is supposed to be explained by a 
Sansci-it root signifying to stand, in Latin stare, alluding, 
of course, to the immovable positions of the stars. But 
the use of the star-shaped diagram in astrology suggests 
another idea. The word for mountain is tor, expressed in 
writing by a triangle, our letter D, the Greek A.* The 
symbolic star with six points (for the heraldic star with 
five points is not a star at all, but a mullet or spur), was 
made by crossing two triangles \X , and called the Sacred 
Tor, S"TOR, and was used thus, abundantly, by the ma- 
gicians and cabbalists as the background or framework of 
their horoscopes. It seems to be one of those numerous 
implantations of a later astrological mythology upon an 
older pyramid or mountain-worship with which I should 
be loth just now to interrupt the subject of this lecture. 

Confining our attention to the group of sciences to which 
this lecture is devoted, it is plainly to be seen that their 
utterly embryonic condition in ancient times, and the ab- 
stract and cosmical character which they bear, make it 
unlikely that we can get from them many concrete facts 
respecting the earliest times of man. 

I will begin with the science of Numbers. From what 
we know of the notation of savage tribes of the present 
■day, we may infer with great certainty some of the intel- 
lectual conditions of man^s earliest residence upon the 
planet. I leave to the next lecture the question how long 
man has lived upon the earth. I take for granted also this 
evening that his first appearance was in an undeveloped 
■condition of mind. The ideas of number which savages 
of the present day possess are strangely limited : some of 
the lowest tribes cannot count above three ; the Australians 

any one, who has virtue and judgment, not to reverence you, who are a 
very target of wonders, into which the stars, contending in your favour, 
have shot all the arrows of their gifts.' — Letter of Ai-retino to Michael 
Angelo, in Perkins' Tuscan Sculptors, vol. ii. p. 50. 

* See Rawlinsou's picture of the hill Koukab ('the star') in his Baby- 
lon (about page 140). See also the fact that sb, a star -^ means not 
only to adore, but & gate (or door). Bunsen, p. 537, Egypt, vol. i., 7th 
determinative. 



II.] ANCIENT AND MODERN. 35 

count only to four, and after that all numbers are to ttiem 
merely Katiiuol-Kauwol, ' many/ or Bungii Galang, ' very 
many/ Many stop at five ; others count up to ten before 
they begin again. The Sioux Indians, Dr Hayden tells 
me, count upon their ten fingers and their ten toes, and 
call that one man ; their first unit is therefore one, and 
their second unit is twenty. Pliny Chase has discussed this 
curious subject with great skill, to develope the funda- 
mental ideas of the numbers on the basis of the names 
which are given to them in many languages. He finds 
that their very names show how feeble the mathematical 
faculty of the savage must be. In some of these wild lan- 
guages even the word for three means two and one ; four 
means twice two ; five, three and two ; six and eight mean 
the second three or the second four, &c. 

Imagine, if you can, the barrier to mental development 
which such an embryonic notation must be. Think of the 
difference between making nine strokes, as the old Egyptian 
had to do, and writing our Arabic numeral 9. Progress in 
mathematical machinery was at first very slow ; yet our 
cypher 8 is merely a more convenient form of the old 

•^^yP^^^^ 1(11 " ^'^ some respects their notation seems 

simpler than ours, as when they represented 10 by (j, 100 

by (p, 1000 by ^ , 10,000 by '^, 1,000,000 by ^ , and 

1,000,000,000,000,000,000 by l£j. 

But it was not really so ; for nothing can excel the utility 
and simplicity of our decimal system, unless it be a similar 
system with a decimal of 8, or 12, or 16, instead of 10. 
A.ny advance in ti-ue physical science was impossible in 
early times merely for want of some such counting machine. 
The first ages of humanity were devoted to darkness be- 
cause all numbers beyond a score or a hundred were alike 
uncountable. In fact, there is a natural dislike to mathe- 
matics in the untutored mind ; it brings too great a strain 
upon the intellect. You remember the Arab Sheik's reply 
to Layard's friend : — 'Although I have passed all my days 
in this place, I have neither counted the houses, nor in- 
quired into the number of the inhabitants. Shall we say. 



36 GENIUS OF THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES, [lECT. 

Beliold this star spinnetli round that star, and this other 
star with a tail goeth and cometh in so many years ? Let 
it go ! God will guide it.' This of itself is sufficient to 
explain the reckless chronologies of early days, and the 
unblushing coolness with which thousands of years were 
lavished on the reigns (or life-times) of half-a-dozen genera- 
tions. 

And yet, the occurrence of those immense numbers at 
the beginning of the Egyptian and Indian history hints to 
us the existence of some profound consciousness of an im- 
mense preceding antiquity residing in the ancient mind. 
The old bards were aware that the race had been tens of 
thousands of years upon the earth from considerations of 
architecture and traditions, now lost, just as we have been 
made aware of it by considerations of a geological nature. 
Hence it was natural for them to make a rude calculation 
of the pi'ecession of the equinoxes and fix the date of the 
beginning of the Egyptian empire at 35,000 years. 

Now it is in taking up such rude calculations of the an- 
cients and making them more precise, and applying them 
with a cultivated common sense, that modern Mathematics 
and Astronomy find a chance to employ themselves about 
the question of the original conditions of our race. The 
discussions over the zodiac of Denderah, although they 
resulted in proving it to be a mere astrological diagram of 
no astronomical value whatever, and therefore useless to 
the historian, were still of use in opening up other and 
more fruitful resources. The fables of antiquity are often 
good ethnological guides, and some of these come within 
challenge of this mathematic group of sciences. 

Take for an example one of Kepler^s most happy hits. 
It is rather too modern an instance, for it relates to an 
event dating less than 2000 years back. But it is a fine 
illustration of the treatment which the modern sciences 
are prepared to give to any ancient record that may be 
brought under their notice. Kepler was engaged in cal- 
culating backwards the orbits of our two largest planets, 
Saturn and Jupiter, when, to his astonishment and great 
delight, he saw that one of their conjunctions, and one of 
the vei-y closest and most splendid that they had ever 
had, happened, under the most favourable circumstances 
for seeing it, precisely at the birth of Christ as given in 



II.] ANCIENT AND MODEKN. 37 

the books. Of course the legend of the star in the East 
was at once explained in its most essential features. 

In like manner, taking an example a few centuries 
farther back, the recalculation of the eclipse of Thales has 
become the starting-point of the chronologists in their 
rectification of the old Greek tables. 

Going back much farther, some of the most important 
Egyptian dates have been obtained by calculating the 
heliacal rising of Sirius and other stars watched by the 
Egyptians on account of their connection with that vitally 
interesting event to them, the beginning inundation of the 
Nile. Much of that old mythology receives an easy ex- 
planation in this way. 

I have just alluded to the use made of the precession of 
the equinoxes. A similar use is made of the ellipticity of 
the earth''s orbit. A discussion is going on (at present) 
respecting the effect upon old climates which a regular 
variation in the shape of the orbit of the earth must have 
produced. Laplace calcidated the maximum and minimum 
of this ellipticity, and commenced the calculation of the 
length of time required to lengthen it out to its longest, 
and then to reduce it to its roundest form. The subject 
has been taken up lately by others to show that while 
the corrected mean distance of the earth from the sun is 
just now about 93 millions of miles, there must have oc- 
curred, at enormous intervals of time, periodically, such 
elongations and contractions of the orbit as to bring the 
earth during one season of the year within 85 millions of 
miles of the sun, and during another part of the year to 
carry it off 105 millions. This extreme ellipticity, how- 
ever, must take place in a different direction each time, so 
that the closeness of the earth to the sun will sometimes 
coincide with the summer of the northern hemisphere and 
sometimes with its winter. When it coincides with sum- 
mer, then the northern hemisphere must suffer the most 
extraordinary variations of temperature, the absolute ex- 
tremes of both summer and winter, during which it is hard 
to see how human life could be successfully preserved 
upon the earth. Such was the glacial epoch — all the 
glacial epochs. On the other hand, when the earth re- 
cedes farthest during summer, and approaches nearest 
during winter in the northern hemisphere the amount of 



38 GENIUS OP THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES,, [lBCT. 

"beat received from day to day from the sun must be almost 
invariable round the whole year. Then reigns perennial 
spring. Then animal and vegetable life holds its millennial 
holiday. Such was the carboniferous era — all the car- 
boniferous eras. 

I did not mean this evening to touch upon the geological 
antiquity of man^ reserving that for the next lecture^ but 
you will see at once that this astronomical question of 
the ellipticity of the earth^s orbit bears directly and 
heavily upon the date of man^s origin. If the last max- 
imum ellipticity happened^ say 100^000 years ago^ causing 
the last glacialism of the northern hemisphere^ and if we 
can find any facts connecting that glacial condition of the 
earth with the remains of man^ then the conclusions so 
derived must influence other lines of inquiry. And yet it 
is but one very little streak of light,, mere candle-light, 
which astronomy throws in among the shadows of those- 
Robin Hood and Robinson Crusoe days of mankind. 

2. Another such glimmer of poor information is furnished 
by Physical Greography^ the marvellously zealous and pro- 
ductive pursuit of wliich^ within the present century bears 
to the geography of the ancients about the same propor- 
tions which the results of modern astronomy bear to the 
dreams of ancient astrology. To feel the full force of this 
comparison you need only lay upon your table the poor 
little sketch-map of Ptolemy; then spread abroad upon 
your floor the sheets of the Swiss, French, Swedish, or 
British topographical surveys. In the former all is mon- 
strous and confused, not a latitude or longitude correct; 
not a line or part of a line in any portion of it represent- 
ative of truth ; the small is large, the large is small ; and 
fancy fills up spaces where the scanty and untrustworthy 
reports of travellers have failed. In the latter every moun- 
tain-peak is established by a reference to some measured 
base line ; every stream is traced with compass and level 
up to its tiny rivulets; every man's possessions are de- 
fined as if the entire map was but a recorded deed of 
purchase; his house, his garden, even the footpath which 
has at its stile the warning sign-board ' beware of spring- 
guns ' is laid down. Four miles beyond the walls of the 
city of Bourges the geographers of France have erected 
a pyramidal monument which marks, with true French 



II.] ANCIENT AND MODERN. 39 

idealism but with French mathematical accuracy, the pre- 
cise centre of France as it was before the annexation 
of Nice and Savoy. At every mile along the southern 
boundary of Pennsylvania,, Mason and Dixon planted pillars 
of stone which still remain. On the top of Mount Desert, 
Wachusettj the Blue Hill in Milton^ and a thousand other 
eminences along the Atlantic seaboard, stand the remains 
of the heliotropes of Hassler, Bache, and Borden, their 
relative positions determined by hundreds of thousands of 
observations, to the fi*action of a linear foot.* Russia and 
India are being mapped with the same accuracy and par- 
ticularity. Even the hideous deserts of Asia, and the 
hitherto inaccessible interior table-lands of Africa, are 
falling into shape under the analytical studies which 
Murchison and the men of the London Royal Geographical 
Society are incessantly making from the itineraries and 
sketches and astronomical observations of Mann and Liv- 
ingstone, Burton and Speke, and Grant and Barr, and the 
brothers Schlagintweit, and a hundred other daring ex- 
plorers, too many of whom have already paid the forfeit 
of their enthusiasm with their lives. 

We look in vain for any analogue of this accurate science 
in ancient days. 

It is true. Col. Yyse, Mr Turner, and the Astronomer 
Royal of Scotland, Mr Piazzi Smyth, have published the 
most remarkable things concerning the great pyramid of 
Cheops. For, according to them, it must have been laid 
out, not by Benjamin Franklin^ s great-grandson, but by 
his great-grandfather 250 generations removed. They 
find its base to be a precise aliquot part of the circumfer- 
ence of the earth. They find all its proportions to be geo- 
metrical and astronomical. The angle of its sides, the 
slope of its galleries, the distances from chamber to cham- 
ber within it they show to be obtainable by compass and 
scale. The granite chest in its central chamber they say 
is no sarcophagus : it is a vast standard bushel, containing 

* Eight hundred counties in the Northern States have been mapped 
so as to .show every house and the owner's name ; and a complete set of 
these maps is preserved in the Library of the British Museum. 

The whole valley of the Mississippi has been crossbarred by the sur- 
veyors of the government of the United States at intervals of six. miles, 
north and south, east and west. 



40 GENIUS OF THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES^ [LECT. 

precisely four Englisli quarterns of corn. And, more than 
all, they think they prove that the builders of this gigantic 
vneter for all time must have come from a distance (per- 
haps from Mesopotamia) in search of some such place as 
Memphis^ where the relations of latitude could come har- 
moniously in among the other geometrical relationships 
which were to be made constants for all science, in this 
pyramid.* 

However true all this may be, it goes but a short dis- 
tance towards our purpose. It is certainly equally true 
that no practical applications of such sequence, if it really 
existed, was ever made in ancient times on any scale de- 
serving of mention by a modern man. The maps which 
ancient Hindu and Chinese books contain are caricatures. 
The oceans, as we know them, were to the ancients a river 
coiled seven times round the entire world inhabited by man ; 
or, at best, a rim of water round an island continent, up from 
which, and down again into which, the sun and heavenly 
systems rose and sank from day to day. A few grand 
thinkers had indeed concluded that the earth was not a 
circular plate, but a globe hung in space : but nothing 
came of this conjecture but that which was in its turn con- 
jecture. The Chinese early knew the magnetic needle ; ■ but 
not how to work out their geography with it, in combina- 
tion with the telescope and spirit-level. Each traveller had 
a different story to tell : the geographer was bewildered 
with their contradictory reports. The skein could never 
be unravelled because the beginning of it could not be 
found ; for the sine qua non of raodern topography is a 
measured base to start with, and the ancients were not up 
to that, although their Euclid is our God of Cambridge. 
But Euclid is one of the moderns. 

It is a very great pity that the ancient world has left us 
no records of physical geography to compare with our own 
observations. Had we correct hypsometrical tables of the 
heights of the Alps as they were 5000 years ago, what 
light that would throw, not only upon the rate and amount 
of the submergence or emergence of the European Oonti- 

* The beautiful applicatiou of physical science, in the double shape of 
the magnesium light and the sensitive photographic plate to the elucida- 
tion of tlie ancient mysteries of the chambers and galleries of the great 
pyramid should not be passed unnoticed. 



II.] ANCIENT AND MODEEN. 41 

nent, but upon tlie migrations of its early inhabitants. 
Eight centuries ago^ for instance^ those dangerous passes 
in the Alps^ which the traveller now can hardly iind a guide 
to pilot him through, were common highroads of communi- 
cation between the Swiss and the Italian villages. A suc- 
cession of cold seasons lengthens all the Swiss glaciers 
sensibly, and increases the privations of the mountaineers. 
There was a time when the isolated glaciers of the Alps 
formed one; covered the whole watershed; spread its edges 
over the low lands, iilled up the lakes, banked against the 
Jura, and probably connected themselves with vast sheets 
of ice and snow around the world, to the detriment, if not 
to an almost complete destruction, of sections of the human 
race. The science of Meteorology has much to teach us 
on this subject. Then there are all the questions of climate 
connecting themselves with the rise of mountains, the 
formation of new sea-currents by fresh volcanic submarine 
obstructions, and the spread and disappearance of great 
forests, all of them determining some fresh investigation 
into the earlier state of man both in historic and in pre- 
historic times. 

What we most miss and need are ancient records of 
these physical changes. 

Had we even a rough outline of the delta of the Nile 
made no farther back than the twelfth dynasty of the pyra- 
mid-builders, how much nearer we could come to the an- 
swer of that vexed question whether Egypt was settled 
from Asia or from Africa ; whether the black man or the 
white man be the elder brother. If the Rig-Veda, instead 
of being a jumble of ceremonial hymns to fire and water, 
w^ere a single tolerably well-constructed map of the valley 
of the Ganges, and the country behind the Sunderbunds, 
how much vain argument respecting the value of the Yug 
chronology and the antiquity of the Turanian tribes of 
the Ghauts and Deccan would have been saved ! All 
science to become efficient must become comparative ; 
this is its second stage. To settle the earliest history we 
need the combined efforts of comparative geography, com- 
parative zoology, and comparative philology. But compara- 
tive geography, or, as we usually call it, Ph^'-sical Geography, 
which, after describing the present status of the earth^s 
features, argues back to what they have been, and seeks 



42 GENIUS OF THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES. 

out both tlie laws wMch. governed tlie change^ and the 
effects which it produced upon living beings^ especially on 
man- — Comparative Geography is^ after all^ only one phase 
of Geology. I will therefore close this lecture here^ and 
promise to take up in the course of the next the points 
which have been just suggested. 

I shall discuss the Geological Antiquity of Manias proved 
by his fossil remains, in connection with the relics of ex- 
tinct animals ; the proofs we have of great geographical 
changes during the human period ; the value of various 
scales of years which geologists have endeavoured to apply 
to the residence of man upon the earth, and the ground of 
the now commonly accepted division of antiquity into three 
definite periods — the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the 
Iron Age. And I shall endeavour to make these questions 
clear by diagrams to the eye, although I may not be able 
to make their ansivers wholly convincing to the judgment 
of Liy audience. 



LECTURE III. 

THE GEOLOGICAL ANTIQUITY OE MAN. 

The antiquity" of mankind^ — tlie dignity of mankind^ — 
tte unity of mankind : — these are the three great prelimi- 
nary questions of ancient history. Three separate sciences 
take charge of them . The antiquity of mankind is a geo- 
logical problem. The dignity of mankind in the scale of 
nature is to be chiefly decided by zoology^ or comparative 
anatomy. The moot question of the unity or diversity of 
the race begins the studies of the ethnologist. 

All three questions have been settled for us^ as you are 
probably but too well aware, many centuries ago by that 
^ science falsely so called ' Theology. And it really seems 
to be a work of clear supererogation to commence the in- 
vestigation aga.in. Are we not assured that the world is 
only about 6000 years old ? That man was made on the 
sixth day of its existence ? Does it not stand so written 
in the books of Moses ? Do we not also hnow that man 
was created upright before he fell^ and of a grade but little 
lower than the angels ; and that his spirit goeth upwards, 
while that of the beast goeth downwards ? All this is too 
distinctly written by holy men of old, who wrote as they 
were moved by the Holy Ghost, to be called in question 
for a moment. Even the smallest particulars are put at 
the service of our curiosity to be received with implicit 
faith : — how that God made one Adam first ; then cast him 
into sleep, took from his side a rib and made a woman of it, 
and how, from these twain, sprang all nations and peoples 
and kindreds and tongues that dwell upon the surface 
of the whole earth, white and black, yellow and brown, 
dwarfish Esquimaux and gigantic Patagonians, woolly- 
haired Melanesians and beautiful Greeks, Jews with great 
noses and Chinese with cat-like eyes, upon every ecu- 



44 THE GEOLOGICAL [LECT. 

tinent and in every remote island of the sea. The books 
of Moses are believed to inform us absolutely of these 
facts^ in language as unmistakably plain as we could 
desire to have it; as plainly^ in fact^ as they inform us 
that the earth was made three days before the sun^ thus 
settling for us the nebular hypothesis^ and various other 
little diflSculties of an astronomical nature which arise 
out of the rotation of the earth and planets according to 
the Oopernican system. 

It is surpi'ising how indifferent men of science seem to be 
to these great statements ! Thousands of preachers proclaim 
them from the pulpit every Sunday in the year ; and 
millions of communicants respond — Amen ! And yet our 
men of science continue sceptical, and call them, as the 
apostles did, old-Avives^ fables. They believe them in- 
deed to be old Jew-legends so palpably heathenish and 
contrary to all we now know that it is not worth while to 
try to show their absurdity. But they add, more seriously, 
that these old fables are no part of Christian theology; 
that they have been foisted into the body of Christian 
divinity to save the brains of the silly, to sustain the 
prestige of the clergy and to excuse the vices of the 
laity; and that they are already disappearing from the 
public faith so fast under the influence of public school- 
education that no especial notice need any more be taken 
of them. It is a noteworthy fact that the books which 
periodically appear in the shops upon the Harmony of 
Science and Keligion, or upon the Helations of Genesis to 
Geology, are written by clergymen ; and all of them in the 
service of Jewish theology. All alike, men of science will 
no longer even read them, but look with as despairing an 
eye upon those who write them as Christiana's party did 
upon the man whom they found asleep upon the enchanted 
ground. 

' And that place was all grown over with briars and 
thorns, excepting here and there where was an enchanted 
arbour, upon which if a man sits, or in which if a man 
sleeps, it is a question, some say, whether ever he shall rise 
or wake again in this world. Over this forest therefore 
they went^ both one and another, and Mr Greatheart went 



in.] ANTIQUITY OP MAN. 45 

before^ for tliat he was tlie guide; and Mr Valiant-for- 
Truth came behind, being rear-guard. Now they had not 
gone far, but a great mist and darkness fell upon them all. 
Wherefore they were forced for some time to feel for one 
another by words, for they walked not by sight. But any 
one must think that here was but sorry going for the best 
of them all ; but how much worse for the women and chil- 
dren who both of feet and heart were but tender. They 
went on till they came to where there was an arbour, 
whei"ein lay two men whose names were Heedless and 
Too-bold. Then the guide did shake them, and do what 
he could to disturb them. Then said one of them, I will 
pay you when I take my money. At which the guide 
shook his head. I will fight so long as I can hold the 
sword in my hand, said the other. At that one of the 
children laughed.^ 

Through this enchanted land men of science have learned 
to hurry on, without any longer even making such benevo- 
lent but futile efforts to awaken the sleepers in its arbours. 

Let us start fair this evening with the discussion of the 
first of the three problems which I have mentioned, viz. 
the geological antiquity of man. To do this we must make 
up our minds to part company with the schoolmen. There 
is no alliance possible between Jewish Theology and 
Modern Science. They are irreconcilable enemies. Ge- 
ology in its present advancement cannot be brought more 
easily into harmony with the Mosaic cosmogony than with 
the Grnostic, the Vedic, or the Scandinavian. It has 
escaped fully and finally from its subjection to the Creed. 
Sindbad has made the little red man of the sea, who sat 
so long on his shoulders, tipsy with new wine, tossed him 
to the ground, and crushed his wicked old head with a 
stone. Sindbad is free. Geologists have won the right 
to be Christians without first becoming Jews. 

The arguments for any geological fact which is at all a 
comprehensive one are gathered only by years of patient 
and laborious observation, not in the closet, but in the 
field, the cabinet and the laboratory. A thousand fruitless 
journeys before success can crown the search ! A thousand 
false hypotheses before the true theory is established ! A 
thousand mistakes of observation published before they 
can get corrected ! Consequently the literature of the 



46 THE GEOLOGICAL [LBCT. 

science is sometliing enormous and appalling. Every new 
step in advance^ while it becomes in one sense easier^ in 
anotlier sense becomes more difficult to make. Outsiders^ 
charlatans, tyros, sciolists, have no chance at all. They 
must take everything on testimony. There was . a time 
when the Dean of Westminster in his study could be a 
tolerable geologist. That time is past. No man who does 
not go out and grapple with nature, wrestling with this 
angel through the long dark night, receives the blessing 
when the sun is up. The knight who will take initiation 
into these myst&ries must make his vigil on the floor of 
the great church, equipped in full armour, fasting and 
alone^ chaste, silent, brave. It is impossible for a mere 
reader of LyelFs Elements, or a mere listener to Sedge- 
wick's lectures, to get that profound faith, that overpower- 
ing conviction of the reality of former creations, and of 
their incalculably great antiquity which is as natural to 
the working field-hand in palaeontology as is his faith in 
the good Grod or in his own past life. If I speak there- 
fore dogmatically to-night, you will understand that the 
great first truths of Geology have been so seen and touched 
and tasted, that they are no longer speculations, but expe- 
riences ; no longer objects of belief, but of absolute know- 
ledge. Geology is not in its infancy ; it has reached a ripe 
maturity. Its greater truths need no further testimonyj 
no more copious illustration than they already have. And 
it is only of such that I will just now speak. Doubtful 
things will come up afterwards. 

Before touching the antiquity of nian^ I must give you 
a clear conception of the immense antiquity of the earth. 

If you see a stone house a-building, you know that the 
foundation walls were built first, and that the cut courses 
must have been laid in an ascending order. You know 
this with absolute certainty. The most direct outside re- 
velation from God could not make it plainer, nor add to 
the force of your conviction. ISTor could the worker of a 
thousand miracles before your eyes shake this conviction 
for an instant. Now Geology is the science of this convic- 
tion applied to the crust of the earth, as an unfinished build- 
ing of stone, the courses of which have been laid in suc- 
cessive days. It has its Metamorphic foundations^ its 
Palgeozoic surbase story, its stately superstructure of Se- 



Ill,] ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 47 

condary and Tertiary rocks, and its Volcanic pinnacles. 
Tlie workmen with their tools are still upon its highest 
scaflFolding. The forms of Lapithse and Centaurs fill all 
the metopes of its entablature. The pediment is even now 
receiving its Olympic synod in low and high relief. Created 
6000 years ago, and in a single day ! You might as well 
affirm that Coin cathedral was begun and finished before 
breakfast yesterday. You might as well believe that 
other oriental story of Aladdin^s palace. 

Three points claim especial attention. The first point 
is the characteristic geological feature of superposition. 
The waters of the globe have been spreading one layer 
of sand and gravel over another, one layer of mud over 
another, one layer of limestone and marl over another, 
without intermission, without haste, with the greatest re- 
gularity, for many millions of years, until the whole thick- 
ness of such aqueous sediments as are known to us, 
amounts to no less than 16,000 fathorhs, say 20 miles, froin 
top to bottom. And when we remember that what we call 
the bottom of these sediments is no true bottom layer, 
but merely the lowest limit of our observations thus far 
reached, we feel ourselves at liberty to carry back the era of 
commencement to an indefinite distance. 

The next point to be insisted upon is the division of the 
time represented by this 20 miles of sediment into four or 
five successive ages ; and the subdivision of each of these 
ages into successive systems ; each system into successive 
formations ; each formation into successive beds ; and each 
bed into lamina or fine layers, no thicker in some cases 
than a sheet of foreign letter-paper. All these different 
ages are as well characterized by distinctive features as 
the ages of architecture are by dift'erent styles. No tra- 
veller thinks of disputing with a local archgeologist while 
he is showing him the curiosities and beauties of a cathe- 
dral or abbey church, founded in one century, enlarged in 
another, partially rebuilt in another, and restored and 
beautified in his own day. There is no mistaking the 
Roman age of the towers of Jumieges, nor the Norman 
age of its roofless nave, nor the later date of' its ruined 
pointed Gothic choir. A glance is sufficient to decide that 
the facade of the Chateau de Galliou could not have been 
designed by any architect who lived when the baths oi 



48 THE GEOLOGICAL [LECT. 

Nero were put up. So a glance from the stage-coach is 
sufficient for the experienced geologist to tell whether he 
be riding through an old Laurentian or Huronian region^ 
or among Palseozoic mountains, or over the later estuary 
sands of the New Red, or over the still more modern plains 
of the Chalk and Greensand formations. And this char- 
acterization of sediments of different ages is carried out in 
nature so completely, and to such minuteness of detail, 
that the good local geologist can recognize, by the very 
surface soil and incidental shapings of the hill-sides, upon 
what particular belt of one formation he is riding, whether 
the rocks around him belong, for instance, to the Upper 
coal measures, or to the Lower ; to the upper, the middle, 
or the lower Silurian. You can easily imagine what an 
impression of time this makes upon the thoughtful mind. 

The Hebrew legend of the creation describes the separa- 
tion of the waters from the dry land as having been de- 
termined by a creative act upon the third day, and fixed 
for all time. The fact is, that no fixed relation of land and 
water has ever been established for the surface of the globe. 
From the beginning land and water have been exchanging 
places. Every acre of the land-surface of the earth which 
geology has examined bears indubitable marks of having 
been not simply overflowed, but actually created at the 
bottom of the ocean. And it is needless for me to tell this 
audience what proofs we have that every part of every coast 
of every ocean is, this evening, while I say it, either rising 
slowly from the waters, or sinking slowly into them. Can 
any phenomenon enhance more highly than this our ideas of 
geological time ? Yet when we come to feel the full force 
of the terms Erosion, Denudation, as applied to the present 
surface of the earth, by which, through the slow wear and 
tear of centuries — millenniums — of fiery summer suns and 
wintry frosts, sedate glaciers and mad torrents, trickling 
rills and mouldering damps, sharp rootlets thi"ust in cracks 
and lichens softening the toughest rock, the very Alps 
have been wasted half away, and where once even mightier 
Alpine ranges ran, now nothing but a continent of rounded, 
grassy, forest- covered hills remains; — still more, were I to 
give you proofs at hand of the repetition of this work in 
all the past ages of the world, and show you the wasted 
outlines of hills and valleys in the inside of the crust itself. 



III.] ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 49 

fossil erosions, hills and valleys embedded like bones and 
shells under whole formations of rock sediment, — you 
would begin to feel the overwhelming weight of geological 
time^ and be disposed to cry — ^Tis but another name for 
an eternity. 

I might illustrate this subject of erosion by many 
beautiful instances, — such as ravines a thousand feet deep 
through prismatic lava fields ; caves which were once but 
one, now separated by a river with cliff walls ; fissures 
filled with what was once rock-oil, afterwards dried into a 
vein of bituminous coal, and now exposed to view on both 
sides of a wide deep valley. If anything has taken time 
it has been this mouldering down of the successive surfaces 
of the planet. 

The third point of prime importance is one that brings 
us close to the subject of our lecture. Every geological 
age has had its own difii'erent and special inhabitants, — its 
successive creations of life-forms. Each geological system, 
even each successive formation, has entombed the remains 
of millions of zoophites, plants and animals peculiar to 
that particular stage of the earth^s history, and to no 
other. I say nothing now of any supposed progression of 
ideas in the creative intelligence embodied in these forms : 
this would come in better shape before us in the next 
lecture. I argue nothing here for or against the theory of 
instantaneous creation ; or the opposite theory of spon- 
taneous development of one set of forms out of another. I 
wish to confine your attention just now to the established 
fact that no geologist can possibly mistake Silurian rocks 
for Devonian, or Devonian for Permian, or Permian for 
Cretaceous, or Cretaceous for Postpleiocene, when he has 
once caught sight of even only a small collection of their 
fossils. Nature is no Brummagem manufacturer of old 
Greek coins or Pharaonic scarabgei to be re-sold to travel- 
lers at the foot of the Pyramids, or in the great hall at 
Carnac. In fact, as if to prevent the possibility of such 
deception, the truth-loving Creator has marked shells of 
similar shapes,* but of different ages, with such delicate but 
unmistakable variations of detail, that we must stand more 
and more amazed, not only at the infinite resources, but 

* E.g. the microscopic dentation discovered by Agassiz in the interior 
lamellse of one of two shells in ail outward respects undistinguishable. 



60 THE GEOLOGICAL [lECT. 

at the inflexible integrity of Hs skill. Surely lie designed 
tliat men sliould not deceive themselves. 

Do you not see what a mistake was made by the fine 
old Hebrew poet who sang the Mosaic song when he 
separated the creation of the land and waters from the 
creation of the fish and air-breathing animals_, fixing the 
former on the third day^ and the latter on the fifth and 
sixth ? But let us do him justice. His is a poem^ not a 
text-book. He could only see the phenomena of the world 
in the twilight of his times ; but his genius grasped them^ 
even thus half seen, in a poetic ordei wonderfully like the 
actual. Nor was it possible for him to describe them 
complicated as they are in nature. With the same ample 
grandeur^ but without the horrors that surround the circu- 
lar stages of Dante^s Hell, he has resumed under seven 
heads the wonders of the universe ; and the order of 
ascending worth which they bore in his own mind tallied 
with that which in the Divine idea compelled the suc- 
cessive stages of development in the history of the earth. 

Conceive now the illimitable stretch of ages upon ages 
occupied in the production, establishment, increase, de- 
cline, extinction, and substitution of these grand ranges 
of successive worlds of vegetable and animal organisms, 
all perfect in themselves, all difiering from one another, 
all harmonizing with the growing physics of the planet, 
and leading slowly but surely up to man. Could God 
have made all this at once ? I speak not of a puckish, 
brutal Demiurge, fond of such practical jokes ; he could. 
I speak of the Christianas Grod of truth, the loving ' Father 
who is in heaven.'' Would it not have been a flagrant 
imposition upon intelligence, — a complicated and most 
flagitious forgery ? Heaven could scarcely have devised 
such a barmecide feast to set before the hungry intellect 
of man. 

Nor is the difiiculty diminished by calling' a day a thou- 
sand years. We have in palaeontology the records of a 
thousand ages. Many of the old limestone strata are en- 
tirely made up of corals and their triturated debris. Some 
of the old Devonian mud-rocks are mere masses of the 
casts of brachiopods, of every size from the youngest to 
the oldest. Some of the coal-measure shales are leaved 



m.J ANTIQUITY OP MAN. 51 

like a book, and every leaf glistens witii delicate fresh- 
water shells. In the Deep-river basin of Nortli Carolina 
millions of fisli-teeth. lie packed away between two layers 
of coal wbicli lie but two feet apart. There are more than 
a hundred beds of coal in a single coal-system, each of 
which is the result of the growth of a peat-bog, swamp, 
and forest of a separate age ; to say nothing of the many 
fathoms of rocks which intervene between each one coal-bed 
and the next in order over it ; during which long interval 
of time the land must have been too deep beneath the 
water level to permit of vegetation.* The fossil dung of 
the fish which swam the seas during the deposition of the 
chalk of England was so abundant that the farmers about 
Cambridge collect it, as it is set free from the mother-rock 
by denudation, and use it to manure their lands. 

Professor Heer, of Zurich, has lately published in his 
admirable Geology of Switzerland a minute history of one 
single formation, only 36 feet thick, which he divides into 
18 beds. It tells a striking story of change and time, 
which we need only multiply by thousands to get some 
adequate notion of the antiquity of the earth. 

Until about 30 years ago the great geological question 
for those who busied themselves with the higher problems 
of life was this : Why do not the remains of man appear 
among the fossil treasures of the earth ? Here the theo- 
logians always had the geologists upon the hip. If the 
earth is so old, they triumphantly clamoured, why does not 
man share in its antiquity ? Show us a fossil human bone 
— a fragment of his skull ; a single tooth will satisfy us, if 
it be imbedded fairly in one of your fossiliferous rocks. 

To this there was but one reply : Wait ! 

The ethnologists, the archeeologists, the egyptologists 
were in the same predicament, and shared to some extent 
in the embarrassment of the palseontologists. They had 

* There are reasons, in my opinion, to believe that many of the inter- 
vals, where they consist of sand, were rather raised above than lowered 
into the water. The calamites, rooted at different heights in the sandy 
strata of the Glass Bay coast of Cape Breton, seem to argue in that di- 
rection. Either emergence or submergence would necessarily put a stop 
to a coal-bed's growth. Probably both explanations are equally admissible 
in their proper places. 



52 THE GEOLOGICAL [lECT. 

found luiman skeletons in ancient caves, mixed with bones 
of animals, some of them foreign to the countries in which 
the caves existed. But there was no date to be assigned 
with any certainty to these ossuary deposits ; there was no 
proof positive that they were not swept into these caves by 
comparatively modern freshets. It was easy to assert, and 
hard to disprove, that the caves were not the habitations 
or at all events places of refuge for the early races of man- 
kind, and that these fed upon the animals whose bones 
were mixed with their own skeletons; or, on the other 
hand, the caves might have been the dens of hyenas whose 
bones were found in some of them in great numbers ; and 
it was reasonable to suppose that these predatory creatures 
might have added human victims to the other evidences of 
their omnivorous rapacity. The whole phenomenon was 
one of such complexity and difficulty that it required a long 
examination. These caves were discovered one by one in 
England, in France, in Sicily, in Brazil, in fact in all coun- 
tries which contain limestone regions. They are very nu- 
merous ; they differ much in the number, kind, proportion, 
and condition of their fossils ; but they almost all agree in 
one principal feature — their bones are preserved from at- 
mospheric decomposition by deposits of carbonate of lime, 
slowly introduced by the infiltration of waters through their 
roofs, forming stalactites above, and a floor of stalagmite 
which covers a red earth in which the bones are buried. 
The hones of man were rare compared with those of other 
animals ; but, on the other hand, the instances of the dis- 
covery of marks oi \h& loresence of w-ari were numerous, and 
the number of stone and flint implements collected from 
all the caves was very great. Yet it is not too strong an 
affirmation, that after all the researches of Buckland and 
Lyell, and Tournal and Schmerling, no one was satisfied 
how the thing would turn out ; what the age of the caves, 
or of their contents, might be ; or what relation the human 
relics really might bear to the remains of animals with 
which they were intermixed, or to the geological sequence 
of aqueous formations constituting the crust of the earth. 
The individual explorers had their own opinions, but the 
world of science watching their labours was not satisfied. 
Buckland published his Heliqui^ Diluvianse in 1823, in 
which he discussed the whole subject of organic forms 



ni.] ANTIQUITY 0¥ MAN. 53 

found in the caves^ the fissures^ and the gravel-beds of 
England^ and conckided that the human remains which he 
had found therein were not so old as the a.ccompanying 
fossils. It was a theolocjical conclusion, and was accepted 
with dehght by the conservative science of England. In- 
deedj it remained a shibboleth of geological orthodoxy in 
England imtil about twenty years ago,* when the acceptation 
of a new series of discovered facts on the Continent broke 
down the bigotry of the British school^ and a general 
stampede of the younger geologists took place to the other 
side of the question. 

In 1828_, that is, five years after the appearance of 
Buckland's book, two French gentlemen in the south of 
France, MM. Tournal and Christy, examined and re- 
ported on fbone caves atBize, and at Pondres nearNismes, 
in the Valley of the Gard. They had found human bones 
and teeth, fragments of pottery in two styles, pointed 
bones and flint hatchets and arrow-heads, cemented in a 
mud breccia with living land shells, and the remains of hath 
recent and extinct animals, such as the hyena, rhinoceros, 
stag, antelope, goat, Lithuanian aurochs and Lapland 
reindeer, the last of which is almost everywhere found 
associated with the mammoth of France in ancient allu- 
viums and cavern muds. These gentlemen also thought 
they perceived unmistakable evidences of a time arrange- 
ment or stratification of the remains such as quite set 
aside the idea that the human relics were introduced 
subsequently. J 

But there were Bucklandites in France also. M. 
Desnoyers pointed to the Druid tumuli and dolmens of 
the primitive inhabitants of Gaul, under which he had 
found quantities of such flint hatchets and arrow-heads, 
pointed bones and coarse pottery, mingled with the sacri- 

* Although Priest M'Enery had early found fliut tools under stalag- 
mite in Kent's Hole, near Torquay ; and Godwin Austen had published 
in Trans. Geol. Soc. (vi. 1842) flints widely distributed in loam under 
the Kent's Hole stalagmite. In 1858 the new Brixham Cave was ex- 
amined by the Hoyal Society, and made Prestwich and Palconer antedi- 
luvianists. 

t Annales de Chimie et de Physique, p. 161, 1833, Christol. Notice 
8ur les ossements humains des cavernes du Gard. Montpellier, 1829, 

t Lyell, Antiq. of Man, chap. iv. 1863. 



54 THE GEOLOGICAL [lECT. 

ficial bones of deer^ sheep, dogs^ wild boars^ oxen, and 
horses ; but no elephant, rhinoceros, hyena, tiger, or other 
extinct species found in caves had ever shown that these 
aboriginal Celts had been their contemporaries.* 

In 1833 appeared the great work f of Dr Schmerling of 
Liege, in Belgium, who had been devoting several years 
to the exploration of forty caverns in the valleys of the 
river Meuse, the stalagmite floors of which had never 
before been broken up. Here, mingled indiscriminately 
with extinct bear, hyena, elephant, and rhinoceros, and 
modern beaver, cat, wildboar, roebuck, hedgehog, and 
wolf, above them and below them; and in the same degree 
of preservation in all respects he found the rolled and 
scattered bones of men. None of the common marks of 
burial were seen. None of the bones were gnawed, as if 
by animals. No coprohtes or fossil dung of predatory 
beasts were found ; the caves had not been dens. The 
osseous stratum was an undoubted aqueous deposit, 
brought into the caverns through fissures communicating 
with the surface. Thousands of snail shells, and one 
snake, a few fresh-water fish-bones and the bones of 
several birds led to the same conclusion. 

In the Engis cave, eight miles S.W. of Liege, fragments 
of three human bodies (chiefly skulls) were found. The 
now celebrated Engis skull lay buried, five feet deep, in 
the mud beneath the alabaster covering, along with a 
rhinoceros tooth and reindeer bones. 

In the Engihoul cavern opposite, remains of at least 
three bodies were discovered, chiefly belonging to the arms 
and legs. 

The Chokier cavern, two and a-half miles S.W. of 
Liege, afforded many fragments of th»., bodies and limbs of 
bears, but skulls were rare ; in othei caves bear-skulls 
were numerous, and trunk and limb bones rare ; at Goffon- 
taine all parts were in proportion. In the Ohokier cave he 
found a polished bone needle with a hole pierced through 
its base for an eye. Another cut bone was found in the 

* Desnoyer, Bull, de la Soc. Geol. ii. 252. And S. V. Caverne, Diet. 
Univ. d'Hist. Nat. Paris, 1845. 

■f Eecherches sur les ossements fossiles decouverts dans les cavernes 
de la Province de Liege, 1833-1834. 



III.] ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 55 

Bngis cave ; and rude flint instiTiments^ distributed through 
red loam, were common in all the other caves. 

Mankind were obviously then contemporary with the ex- 
tinct carnivora and pachyderms. So much was certainly 
made out. But still, it had not been proved that these 
tropical creatvires had ever lived in Europe. Schmerling- 
imagined therefore (that panacea for all geological difficult- 
ies) a cataclysm or deluge, of undetermined date, which 
had swept their bodies over from Africa to bury them upon 
the shores of the Northern seas. Whether they had first 
been left as a diluvial deposit on the surface of the land 
and afterwards found their way into the caves he did not 
undertake to determine. And he still further puzzled the 
whole question by asserting that among the various re- 
mains of other animals he had found those of the South 
American agouti, which however afterwards turned out 
to be those of an extinct species of French porcupine. 

Eight more years passed in fruitless speculation ; during 
which the patient Belgian continued to be let down by 
ropes from the top of the crags which make the valleys of 
the Meuse the most picturesque in the world, and to crawl 
on his hands and knees, pick in, hand, through the drip- 
ping caves and fissures which penetrate the Devonian 
limestone in every direction ; visited by geologists and 
archgeologists from all parts of Europe, who could only 
tell him stories of similar discoveries made by themselves 
in other regions, but nothing new; nothing to shed light 
upon his splendid cabinet; nothing to solve the riddle by. 
Then Isis smiled upon her puzzled priests, lifted another 
corner of her veil, and made a new suggestion. The 
answer to the conundrum began to shape itself at last in 
intelligible words. 

It was now 1841, when an old antiquary, walking out 
from his chateau in the little city of Abbeville, through 
which the highway runs from Boulogne-sur-mer to Paris, 
where it crosses the river Somme, watched one day work- 
men shovelling gravel from the quarries on the heights 
beyond the city walls. Among the fantastic forms of 
flint which they threw out his quick, experienced eye 
detected, as he thought^ one that looked unnatural.^ He 
picked it up and looked at it more carefully. Could he be 
mistaken ? Had he not seen such in cabinets of anti- 



56 THE GEOLOGICAL [lECT. 

quities ? Tlie more lie looked at it tlie more lie was con- 
vinced that it had been tampered with; in fact, manu- 
factured by the hands of man. Yet how could that be ? 
He asked the workman to show him the exact spot from 
which it had been shovelled. It was a bed of waterworn 
and broken flints_, deep beneath the surface^ covered by a 
deposit of loam^ several yards in thickness.* None of the 
other flints showed the same marks. They were rounded^ 
except where broken across, knobbed like potatoes when 
they grow in a bunch attached together, and coated with a 
crust of dull white substance due to the decomposition of 
their surfaces. The piece he held in his hand, on the con- 
trary, was of a regular shape, chipped to an edge on both 
sides, and brought to a point at one end by the loss of a 
multitude of little fl.akes, such as no attrition or percussion 
in running waters could possibly eiSect. The other end 
was round and still retained the dull white crust which 
characterized the unmanufactured flints among which it 
had lain embedded. He took it home. He went into his 
museum. He compared it with stone hatchets, arrow- 
points, spear-heads, chisels, and pointed tools of various 
kinds which he had got from the Druid barrows and dol- 
mens of Normandy. There was no mistaking its resem- 
blance to these works of human art, some of which were 
more carefully prepared, and were even polished ; but 
others of them were quite as rude as the one which he had 
found. t 

Here then was a discovery ! But he was enough of a 
geologist to see all its difficulties. He must be still more 
sure that it was a genuine inhabitant of that bed of flints 
beneath the bed of loam. Nay, his specimen would be 
laughed to scorn if he presented it to the learned world 
by itself. All the world would say that he had dropped it 

* 'For a section and description of this famous locality, see Lyell's 
Ant. of Man, p. 135. See Prestwicb's section of the valley in the 
Journal of Geol. Soc., Loudon. For section of description of Menche- 
court quarries see Proceedings of Amer. Phil. Soc, 1864;. 

f There are also deeper cavities flaked out for the ends of the thumb 
and index, finger to be noticed in many of these tools, while some are 
shown in this way to have been used alternately or at pleasure by grasp- 
ing either end. — See also Mr Ramsay's testimony, in Lyell's Antiquity of 
Man. 



III.] ANTIQUITY OP MAN. 57 

accidentally from his pocket in among the debris of the 
quarry, even if politeness or good nature prevented a more 
damaging insinuation. Perhaps some workman had 
picked it up upon the surface of the ground, and dropped 
it in the quarry. All cabinet collectors know how often 
specimens get into wrong boxes. All geologists know 
how easy it is to mistake the situation of a fossil. He 
must find more of them or say nothing more about it. 

For six long years Boucher de Perthes became as 
sedulous a hanger-on about the quarries in the valley of 
the Somme as any seedy old nobleman in the Quartier 
Latin about the Luxembourg. And he was rewarded. As 
the workmen advanced the headings of their pits and 
opened back the flint bed which had the loam above it 
and the solid chalk below it, the antiquary stood by (or his 
servants for him when he was sick) and selected out the 
manufactured flints one by one as they appeared. He feed 
the workmen themselves to vigilance. When a flint in- 
strument appeared they wt)uld .leave it in its place and 
send for the old crazy man, as they thought him^ to come 
from the city and take it out of its long resting-place him- 
self. The number thus obtained was immense. At last 
he could contain his knowledge no longer. He took a 
thousand of them up to Paris and showed them to the 
Academicians. But what did these men know ? It was a 
favourite jest of a French wit that all the science of the 
Royal Academy of France was in the head of its 41st 
member. It had but 40 members. Boucher de Perthes 
was as much the old crazy man at Paris as at Abbeville. 

In 1847 he published the first volume of his great book, 
Antiquites Celtiques, in which he gave a full account of 
his discoveries, calling them antediluvian, because they 
were made in the bottom layers of what all geologists had 
called the great Diluvium, or Diluvial Drift, taking their 
terminology from the science of the Middle Ages, based 
on the stories of the Sacred Scriptures of the Jews. His 
account produced no impression. It was puzzling enough 
to solve the riddle of the caves ; this man had proposed a 
still more tremendous problem : how the remains of man 
came to be buried in the rocks themselves. The easiest 
way was to ignore the whole afiair. Some denied that the 
tools were anything more than natural fragments. Others 



58 THE GEOLOGICAL [lECT. 

denied that they were found 30 feet beneath the surface. 
Elie de Beaumont, the disciple of Ouvier, and the head of 
the geologists in France, reasserted Cuvier's opinion that 
the old gravel-beds of the valley of the Somme had 
slipped down the hill-sides to their present situation; 
therefore he did not care whether the flints were manu- 
factured or not ; whether they were found 30 feet below 
the surface or not. The quarries were only worked in 
winter ; nobody in his senses would leave Paris in winter- 
time to prove the assertions of a pi'ovincial antiquarian 
whose whole story was improbable, and if true would 
upset all preconceived opinions. Even Dr E,igollet, who 
lived in the same valley at Amiens, not 30 miles from 
Abbeville, and who had written in 1819 a memoir on the 
fossil mammalia of the valley, took no pains to verify his 
neighbour's facts for more than three years after the 
Antiquites Celtiques appeared in press, but denied them 
heartily, until he one day paid Boucher de Perthes a 
visit and returned to his own home only to find similar 
evidences of man's early existence in its immediate 
vicinity ; nor did he publish his recantation for four more 
years, after he had made a large collection for himself. 

And so the matter rested. Boucher de Perthes went 
on collecting specimens and enlai-ging and arranging his 
cabinet, biding his time. It came at last. He was now the 
great man of the day in geological archseology ; for, like 
Linn^us, and Ouvier, and Lavoisier, and Hunter, he has 
started one of the sciences on a new career. Let no man 
doubt his own genius ! it is the suicide of immortality ! 

The final impulse came at last, not from Germany the 
land of abstract ideas, nor from France the land of wit 
and mathematics, but from conservative, plodding, snob- 
bish, prosaic old England the land of tardy, ungraceful, 
but staunch, indomitable love of justice and the truth. 

It had got to be now 1858, when the mouth of a new bone- 
cave was discovered at Brixham,* five miles west of the old 
Kent's Hole,t and the Royal Society deputed its two most 

* Three or four miles west of Torquay. 

f One mile east of Torquay. In this cave Priest M'Enery had found 
about 1830, in red loam under stalagmite, mammoth, tichorine rhinoceros, 
cave bear, &c. &c., with flint ; and Lyell thinks he was only prevented by 
his respect for Bucklaud from expressing then his conviction that these 
were contemporary fossils. (Note on p. 97 of Lyell's Ant. of Man.) 



III.] ANTIQUITY or MAN. 59 

famous diluvial fossil hunters^ Mr Prestwicli and Dr 
Falconer (returned from a. glorious career in India and 
now alas lost to us just as lie had become one of tlie 
masters in our Israel) to examine it. They came — they 
saw — and they were conquered. The united length of 
five galleries cleared and examined was several hundred 
feet. Their width nowhere exceeded eight feet. Some- 
times they were filled to the very roof with gravely bones^ 
and mudj the latter always covered with stalagmite, from 
1 to 15 inches thick, itself sometimes containing bones, 
e. g. a perfect antler of a reindeer and an entire humerus 
of a bear. The loam or bone-earth under it was from 1 to 
15 feet in depth. The gravel at the bottom contained no 
relics, and was sometimes more than 20 feet in depth. 
No human bones were found, but many flint knives, chiefly 
in the lowest part of the red loam, one of the most perfect 
having 13 feet of bone-dirt over it, and some of them found 
directly underneath the extinct forms embedded in the 
stalagmite covering and therefore necessarily of an older 
age. To add certainty to the date a perfect knife was 
found close to and on a level with the left hind-leg of a 
cave-bear, which had all its parts arranged in such complete 
order that they must have been held together by the tis- 
sues when they were floated into their resting-place be- 
side the knife. 

One more step taken and Boucher de Perthes was vindi- 
cated and revenged. The step had to be taken. The ex- 
plorers could not help noticing that the country about the 
Brixham cave had suffered great changes to permit the cave 
to be thus filled. The valleys had been lowered at least 60 
feet since the introduction of the gravel to the cave. Then, 
a strong stream ran through it rolling stones along. As 
the waters became more quiet the red mud was deposited ; 
finally, the alabaster drippings had their day, interrupted 
by recurrences of i-ainy eras of unknown duration. The 
geological age of the deposit was therefore immense.* 

Dr Falconer, shortly afterwards, on his way to Sicily 
stopped at Abbeville and wrote to Mr Prestwich that 
it was now high time to do something about the much-dis- 

* See Lyell's discussion of the change of climate, based on the character 
of the Ci/rena fluminalis, and of the change of sea level. Ant. Man, pp. 
143, 177. 



60 THE GEOLOGICAL [lECT. 

puted flints of Bouclier de Perthes. Immediately a crowd 
of people, John Evans, Mr Flower, Sir Charles Lyell, 
Prof. Eogers, Mr George Pouchet, M. Gaudry, M. Hebert, 
Desnoyers, Qiiatrefages, everybody, now rushed down to 
Abbeville, to St Acheul, to Kouen and to other places in 
the valley of the Somme, to pick out flint implements with 
their own hands from the diluvium. Soon a trade sprung 
up between the quarrymen and travellers of all kinds. 
The demand began to exceed the supply. The workmen 
made expei-iments, and finding themselves as good as 
savages, forged ancient knives with modern hammers out 
of the diluvial flints. The cabinets of Europe and America 
became stocked from Moulin Quignon and Menchecourt, 
and the whole valley of the Somme fell once more into 
disrepute. 

But the whole thing was now un fait accomjjU. People 
were at last convinced that man was no exception to the 
fossil world. Englishmen who had fought so long against 
the ante-diluvial age spread themselves through the libra- 
ries of Oxford and Cambridge, and over the bogs and deltas 
and downs of Great Britain, only to discover similar worked 
flint deposits in diluvium with extinct animal remains in 
many places themselves, and records of such discoveries 
by others more than two centuries before. 

A new impetus also was imparted to the exploration of 
new caves, which is still carried on with unabated energy 
and fine results. I have already tasked your patience too 
severely this evening to impose upon you further even a 
rude sketch of what these last seven years have produced : 
the labours of Lartet in the south of France ; the discovery 
of the Neanderthal skull ; the explorations carried on in 
the lake villages of Switzerland; the cleaning out of a 
great fissure in the Gibraltar mountain, and the curious 
skeletons found therein ; the discovery of hviman bones in 
the diluvium of Abbeville ; * the claim of Desnoyers to 

* For the discussion on the jaw, see Quatrefages in the Contes Rendus 
Lyell, "Vogt, &c. In the Bullet. Soc. Geologique de Erance, xxviii., Nov., 
Dec.j 1864, p. 93, M. de Mercey refers to the discovery of the jaw, 28th 
March, 1863, and subsequent discoveries by Boucher de Perthes of others 
at the base of the diluvium and in the top sand-layers. He adds that he 
himself, with Dr Dubois and M. Buteux, saw others taken out from the base 
of the deposit, July 16th, 1864; and with Boucher de Perthes, Dubois, 
and Rene Vion, Sept. 27th, 1864, a metacarpal bone and left index per- 



ni.] ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 61 

the determination of tertiary human relics far older than 
the post-tertiary flint instruments of St Acheul and Abbe- 
ville.* Some of these topics should come up again in my 
next lecture on the comparative dignity of man. 

But I cannot close to-night without making certain that 
the gist of the question of man^s comparative antiquity 
is clearly vmderstood. It is not a question of a definite 
number of years. No geologist pretends to fix an exact 
date to any event in geology. It is one of the comparative 
sciences, essentially so. The difference between tertiary 
and post-tertiary counts for almost nothing in the entire 
column of formations which compose the crust of the earth, 
as the tabular view next page will show. Yet it is immense, 
enormous, shocking to the mind of man when applied to 
his historic life on earth. It is considered a triumph of 
discovery when we succeed in finding a reptile, or a fish, 
or a plant in a subordinate formation only one degree 
older than the oldest stratum in which as yet we have dis- 
covered it. The whole creation has seemed as if creeping 
backward — downward in the column of rocks, backv^^ard 
in the ages — by such discoveries, annually nay daily 
made by that busy crowd of lonely explorers whom, if we 
had Uriers eyesight, we might see creeping and climbing 
and hammering and picking and pocketing for home ex- 
amination, note-book in hand, dispersed all over the civil- 
ized, and here and there to be descried in the most remote 
corners of the uncivilized, world. These men are poets, 
working out the rhymes and the rhythm of that great 
psalm of life which is to be sung in chorus when all work 
is done j when the young men will have much to say to 

fectly preserved, ascribed by Gaudry to an adult man of ordinary size. 
His whole paper, pp. 69 — lOi, is full of interest ; it is entitled. Note sur 
les elements du terrain quaternaire aux environs de Paris, et specialement 
dans le bassin de la Somme ; par M. N. de Mercey. It is illustrated with 
numerous excellent sections, &c. Also 'J'royon's L'homme Possile, p. 30. 
* I say nothing of the human pelvis found at Natchez, and too confidently 
accepted by Sir Charles Lyell (p. 200), because grave doubts still hover 
about its authenticity. But while putting these pages to press the news 
from Paris was received that at the meeting of the International An- 
thropological Society in that city in August of this year, ' two memoirs 
due to the Abbe Bourgeois and the Abbe Delaunay have established be- 
yond doubt, that man was already in existence at the epoch of the Lower 
Pleiocene.' — See also Lyell's discussion of the Lava Man of Denise (Ant. 
Man, p. 194). 



62 



THE GEOLOGICAL 



[lbot. 



LyelVs Tabular View of the Fossilife^'ous Strata.* 

Recent "1 -r, , . , . 

-D J. T >>rost-tertiary. 

ir'ost-piiocene J •' 

Newer-l -, . 
^pli 



locene 



raiocene 



Tertiary or Oainozoio. 



wliite chalk 



> Cretaceous 



l- green sand 



Older- J 
TJpper- 
Lower- 
TJpper- 

8 Middle- j-eocene 

9 Lower- J 

10 Maestriclit beds 

11 Upper- 
•12 Lower- 

13 Upper- 

14 Gault 

15 Lower 

16 Wealden 

17 Purbeck beds 

18 Portland stone 

19 Kimmeridge clay 

20 Coral rag 

21 Oxford clay 

22 Great Bath-l ... 

23 Inferior- f^^*^ 

24 Lias 

25 Upper- 1 

26 Musclielkalk J-Triassic 

27 Lower- J 

28 Magnesian limestone or Permian 

29 Coal measures 1 ri i. •/• 

oA n 1, -i* r J- hCarboniierous 

30 CarbomierouslimestoneJ 

oo T " 1- Devonian 

o2 Liower-j 

o ( T ^Silurian 

34 Lower-J 

PP ^" I Cambrian ? = Huronian 

ijower- 



Secondary or 
Mesozoic. 



'Jurassic 



Primary or 
Palaeozoic. 



35 
36 
37 



PP " iLaurentian 
Lower- 



* Antiquity of Man, p. 7. 
complete the column. 



The Huronian and Laurentian are added to 



ni.l ANTIQUITY OP MAN. 63 

the prophets that will astonish them. And nothing will 
more astonish them than what they shall hear sung of the 
antiquity of the race which they belonged to^, and glorified^ 
but which they imagined had been created only two or 
three thousand years before their individual selves. 

I said, no scale of years ! I must modify the expression. 
I should have said no scale of years in a condition to be 
used. Imagine a corps of detectives, belonging to the 
secret police, excited by the news of the commission of 
some masterpiece of felony, and stimulated by profes- 
sional zeal, ambition, and the hopes of a large reward, who 
have come upon the trail of the criminals, have found 
traces of their work, have collected a little heap of letters 
torn into minute fragments by the rascals, and are now 
sitting round ^ table sorting the tiny shreds, all crumbled 
up and half illegible with lying in the mud. See them 
examine piece after piece and utter a suppressed exclama- 
tion when they detect a part of a word that they can 
recognize ! See them lay the ragged edges of a dozen of 
them together and shift and turn them about until they fit 
and form a larger piece ! See them hand their odd pieces 
across the table to each other, that what one man cannot 
use another may be more fortunate with ! Until the hours 
go by, and the documents begin to assume a form, and 
the handwi'iting begins to make sense, and the key is got, 
and they break up the midnight party, tired, but jolly, 
and masters of the evidence that shall hang the rogues ! 

Such, if you will believe it, is the condition of the scale 
of years, which (originally, perfect and abundant evidence 
of the work which sunlight and mo on -attraction have 
been doing on the sui-face of the earth) has been all torn 
to pieces, defaced and covered up by the same cunning 
sun and moon, — is now being picked up and washed and 
put together and restored by the geologists. The rings 
of bark in trees submerged in deltas ; the rain-drop, 
worm-trail, footstep impressions left on the thin laminse of 
tidal estuary mud; the growth of peat in ditches cut for 
fuel at the present day; the wear and tear of basaltic 
columns against which abut the arches of a Boman bridge ; 
the number of lava currents and intervening vegetable 
moulds over buried cities; the height of belts of teredo 
holes around the columns of Jupiter Serapis at Baiae; the 



64 THE GEOLOGICAL [leCT. 

annual rate of emergence of well-known boulders in tlie 
waters of tlie Gulf of Bothnia, and of submergence of the 
missionary villages of Greenland ; * the measurement of 
the three arches of black mould in the railway cutting 
through the cone of the Tiniere in the Canton de Yaud, 
the upper arch containing iron relics of the Roman age, 
the middle arch containing bronze relics of the copper age, 
and the lowest arch containing only hammers and arrow- 
heads of the stone age, and calculated by Morlot to be 
from 5000 to 7000 years old ; the rate of growth of suc- 
cessive layers of cypress forests found in probing the plain 
of New Orleans; the rate of growth of the concentric 
coral reefs of Florida ; the annual rate of increase of the 
Nile sediment obtained by many scores of borings, made 
across the valley ; the rate at which old Sanscrit books 
inform us of the settlement of the valley of the Ganges, 
and the filling up of the marsh lands of Bengal ; — all these 
and many more are fragmentary shreds of a scale of years, 
which we hope some day to put together so that we can 
read and use it to determine the length of time between 
the close of the tertiary era and the present day ; between 
the close of the tertiary era and the glacial drift ; or if 
nothing more, the date of the glacial epoch itself, previous 
to which it seems that man existed on the earth. t 

* Here would come in the whole subject of terrace formations, much too 
extensive a theme to be meddled with in a lecture. See, for example, 
those of Quain Clubbe, in Lyell's Antiquity of Man, p. 240. See also J. 
r. Campbell's Frost and Fire, i. p. 357. Loud. 1845. Lyell's Principles, 
XXX. eh. Chambers made the Quain Clubbe terraces respectively, 56, 65, 
and 155 above the sea ; but at Trondjim there is one 522 feet above sea- 
level. According to Celsius and the ancient geographers, Scandinavia 
was an island after the time of Pliny and before the 9th century. (Lvellj 
p. 52.) 

t But Lyell seems to assert the contrary, when he says (Antiq. IVIan, 
p. 241), ' This period [of continental ice], probably anterior to the earliest 
traces yet brought to light of the human race, may have coincided with 
the submergence of England.' ' And the accumulation of the boulder-clay 
of Norfolk, Suffolk, and Bedfordshire ' (p. 218). On the other hand, it is 
very evident from Heer's account of the Utznach (Zurich) peat-coal 
bed's (in his Urwelt der Schweiz) occurring, as they do, between two 
boulder-clay formations, that there were two separate glacial periods with 
a modern climate period intervening. So too the Sahara seems, by 
Desor's account of Mares's discoveries of fresh-water shells (planorbis) 
92'"- down the artesian wells, to have been twice submerged, to correspond 
with the two glacial eras. Desor shows by the New Zealand glaciers, 
&C.J the improbability of any tciiiversal glacial era. 



III.] ANTIQUITY OF MAN, 65 

In conclusion, I will adduce one more such fragment. 
It is not only a remarkable example of tlie metliod to be 
used, but to sliow you liow well based our hopes must be. 
It is, in fact, the latest, the finest, and if it were proved 
genuine, an absolutely perfect demonstration of the great 
antiquity of man. It is not in any of the books ; I trust 
that M, Agassiz on his return from South America will be 
able to set before us its full value. I obtain it through my 
friend, Dr Henderson, of the United States navy, himself 
an experienced geologist. But the actual observer of the 
fact was a Naturalist of Rio Janeiro, Dr Ildefonso, formerly 
well known to the scientific world. 

Dr Ildefonso, with his amiablo daughters, had been 
amusing themselves for a number of years before Dr H.''s 
visit, in exploring the stalagmite caves which are scattered 
over a considerable region around the harbour of Rio. 
He had obtained a multitude of fossils from a bone-clay 
beneath the stalagmite floor, similar to that which charac- 
terizes the ossuary caves of Europe. Among these fossils 
I understand that he had found the vestiges of man. But 
the important point lies here. The stalagmite deposit 
over the bone-mud is not an amorphous and irregular 
plate, as it necessarily must be in climates like ours where 
rain falls at all seasons of the year and the dripping of 
carbonated waters from the roof must needs be therefore 
continual. The climate of the tropics is humid only half 
the year and dry the rest. Consequently the alabaster of 
Brazilian caves shows annual laminae of growth analogous 
to the ring-growth in trees. Now Dr Ildefonso asserted 
that he and his daughters had repeatedly counted these 
annual layers and found them number as high as twenty 
thousand. 

I leave you to draw the inference. Agassiz estimates 
the age of some fragments of a human skeleton which 
Count Pourtales found embedded in a coral reef in Florida 
at 10,000 years.* Dr Dowler estimates the age of a 
human skeleton found beneath the fourth cypress forest at 
New Orleans at 50,000 years. t The borings of Linant 

* The southern half of the peninsula is post-tertiary, and Agassiz 
says 135,000 years were needful for its formation. See Nott and 
Gliddon, p. 52.' 

t Types of Mankind, p. 352. 

5 



6Q THE GEOLOGICAL [lECT, 

Bey brought up works of Egyptian art from a depth, of 72 
feet, which M. Rosiere estimates at 30,000 years. If 
Girard^s estimate of the growth of the Nile mud be con- 
sidered more correct, the burnt bricks found to the depth, 
of 60 feet below the surface in the borings of Hake Kyan 
Bey must have been 14,000 years old. Yet these are mere 
modern alluvions compared with the diluvium of Abbe- 
ville. And this again can bear no comparison in antiquity 
with the least ancient of the true tertiary strata. My own 
belief is but the reflection of the growing sentiment of 
the whole geological world — a conviction strengthening 
every day, as you may with little trouble see for your- 
selves by glancing through the magazines of current 
scientific literature — that our race has been upon the earth 
for hundreds of thousands of years. 

In what condition I will endeavour to suggest in the 
next lecture. 

But as I have given a general scheme of formations on 
page 62, and as I have referred repeatedly to the fossil 
species with which the remains of man are found in the 
ossuary cave mud and the diluvium, I shall add here the 
latest classification of the subdivisions of the human epoch 
based on contemporary animal remains, and given by Prof. 
E. Eenevier, of Lausanne, in a note supplementary to the 
posthumous work of M. Troyon, entitled L'homme fossile 
and published in July of 1867. 

M. Lartet distinguishes four ages of mankind : — 1. the 
age of the great cave bear ; 2. of the elephant and rhino- 
ceros ; 3. of the reindeer ; 4. of the aurochs. 

M. Troyon, following M. d^Archiac, describes in his 
chapter of the four epochs of the age of Stone : — 1. the 
epoch of the great bear; 2. the epoch of the mammoth; 
3. the epoch of the reindeer; 4. the epoch of the Urus. 

M. Henevier's scheme is as follows : — 

I. Epoch Ante-glacial, in which man was contemporary 
with the Elephas antiquus, Rhinoceros hemitoechus, and 
JJrsus spelceus. During this period man has not been 
proved to exist in the Alpine regions of Europe. 

II. Epoch Glacial, during which man was contemporary 
with the Elephas primigenius, Rhinoceros tichorhinus, JJrsus 
speJrp.us, &c. Switzerland desert and covered with glaciers, 
to the exclusion of man. 



III.] ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 67 

III. Epoch Post-glacial^ during wHch man, contempo-' 
rary of tlie EJephas primigenms and Gervus tarandus, had 
approaclied tlie Alpine countries as near as Schussenried 
in Wurtemberg. 

IV. Epoch Actual, during whicli man had penetrated 
Switzerland, with the Gervus elaphtis, Bos primigenms, &c., 
and begun to construct plank villages on piles in lakes 
which had the same water-level as at present. 



LECTUEE IV. 



ON THE DIGNITY OF MANKIND. 



Man walks enveloped in tlie mystery of Ms own exist- 
ence. How lie exists he knows not. Wiij he exists he 
can only conjecture. What he is^ is the last question ever 
answered to his satisfaction, by God, by nature, or by his 
own heart. All philosophies have been poor inventions to 
manufacture weak replies to it. To-night we stand as 
helplessly aghast at our creation as if no generations had 
preceded us. We look into each others' faces and wonder 
how it comes that we are formed erect, intelligent ; while 
things around us creep, or swim, or fly, speechless and 
servile. 

Out of this wonderment has sprung thfe science of Com- 
parative Zoology. Anxious to know ourselves, we turn 
from side to side to examine curiously the living creatures 
in the world about us. Perhaps comparison with them 
will teach us something. 

Among the endowments of our human nature must be 
numbered a keen sense of its own dignity. It is possible 
that animals may enjoy and be benefited by a like con- 
sciousness. Some of their actions intimate as much. You 
remember the fable of the Artist and the Lion. 

The artist shovfed the lion his last picture, a lion slain 
by a man who stood in a conquering attitude over him. 
^ It is a very fine painting,^ remarked the lion; ' that is, 
considering that the painter was a man ; but if we lions 
were artists we should manage the subject more agreeably 
to the truth and fitness of things ; the posture of the two 
principal figures would be reversed.'' 

In ancient times apologue and allegory was the favourite 



ON THE DIGNITY OF MANKIND. 69 

form of uttered wisdom. Euclid and ^sop ruled the 
world of intellect together ; and were as truly tlie masters 
of the masters of the portico and the grove as the child is 
father to the man. The fable is a key to the transition of 
man from a state of barbarism to a state of civilization. 
It marks the joining line whei"e the quick observant fancy 
meets the reflecting intellect. The vivacity of nature is 
not yet lost ; the majesty of knowledge is not yet quite 
assumed. The poet, the philosopher has been born, but 
the fimiculum uteri is not yet cut. The fable is a constant 
quantity in the Development Theory ; and rules as mightily 
to-day among the E.ed Indians of America^ and among 
the boys of the public schools of Boston, as ever it did in 
the days of Samson and Abimeleoh. 

Necessity is the mother of that invention which we call 
Natural History. Whatever the exigencies of the savage 
life demand, that, of course, monopolizes all its energies 
of observation. The Indian tribes of our North- West 
when asked the name of any one of the thousand flowers 
which bloom upon their prairies, answer simply, * flower.' 
They have but this one name for all of them, for all of 
them are useless. But if you ask these savages the name 
of any of their trees you will receive a score where we have 
only one, for they employ a separate name for every slight 
variety of every species of growing wood ; because their 
very lives depend on knowing which will serve them best. 
Consequently, the names they give describe utilities. It 
is a mistake to suppose that savages have keener senses, 
or superior powers of observation than the highly-educated 
and moi^e intellectually endowed civilized man. For dis- 
crimination is more the product of systematic language 
than of eyesight. Yet, on certain sides, the sides of life 
and death we may well call them, the unhappy savage 
makes himself amazingly acute. His names for things 
which interest him are a study of precise description. 
But he always seizes his victim by the hair of the head ; 
he calls things only by their initials ; therein he differs 
from our naturalist who must give Christian, middle, and 
surname in full, and loves to add the title and address 
besides. The savage lights up his subject with a flash ; 
in the dark chamber of the pyramid, his living tomb, he 



70 ON THE DIGNITY [lECT. 

walks by matchliglit, not by sunlight. But his match is a 
magnesium wire ; and for the moment that it lasts it shines 
forth like the sun itself. 

When the Oherokees first saw the horse bestrode by 
De Soto they were as much amazed as were the soldiers of 
Fabricius when they first beheld the elephants of Pyrrhus. 
But they named it instantly " the animal with a single 
finger-nail.''^ Modern science has made no better general- 
ization than this uniungxdus. If there be a characteristic 
posture for a frog or lizard the Algonquin will be sure to 
show it on the bowl of his tobacco-pipe, the Mexican on 
the temple sculptures in honour of his god. Ethnologists 
have made great capital out of this. The oblique eye and 
elevated ear of the Egyptian effigy is one of the archaeo- 
logical puzzles yet unsolved. 

The same instantaneous play of instinct, through the 
observant fancy of the deaf and dumb, sparkles upon the 
whole surface of their poetic nomenclature. They catch 
the slightest peculiarity of each individual for whom they 
need a name and name him from it by some appropriate, 
imitative, or descriptive gesture : — one from a mole in the 
cheek ; another from his height or dwai'fishness ; another 
from always sitting cross-legged ; another from an habitual 
pensiveness. We grade nations in the scale of civilization 
by this propensity. People who are given to gesticulation 
when they talk, the Italians and the French for instance, 
are set down as imperfectly cultivated nations ; for gesti- 
culation when spontaneous is imitative, the supplement of 
language, making its shortcomings good. The well-bred 
gentleman has a quiet mien because in his position the 
brain relieves the body of all responsibility ; because 
abstract ideas take the place of concrete examples not 
only in his solitary hours of thought but in his intercourse 
with gentlemen. The highest conversation goes on by 
hints, not by descriptions of things. The intercourse of 
low-bred people and of the savage world of man in every 
age must ever be the prosy iteration of details. 

The development of the savage faculty of observation 
under the tuition of our modern information makes the 
technical naturalist, the describer of details, the mere 
determiner and namer of species of animate and inanimate 
things. This is the lowest order among men of science. 



IV.] OF MANKIND. 71 

constituting a class wliich represents the savage or prim- 
eval man in the circle of the highest civilization ; a class 
characterized also by two other well-marked traits common 
to savages — an inordinate jealousy and love for personal 
reputation in details — and a materialism, springing from 
too close and too uninterrupted dealings with flesh and 
blood alone. Even the laws which this class of naturalists 
discover are laws of form, and are soon personified by them 
as the sole deities. 

No student of nature is competent to be ennobled until 
he has begun to reason largel}^ upon his observations and 
to put his well-bred fancy to its higher trials with courage, 
hope, and modesty. The genuine man of science is like 
the new spider which they are studying at the Cambridge 
Botanical Gardens. It has two spinnerets. With one it 
spins a coarse, strong, silvery-coloured thread which it uses 
for the radii and stanchions of its web. l^hen afterwards 
with the other it spins a finei golden-coloured silk, with 
which it fills-in all the intervals, and so completes the har- 
mony and beauty of its web, establishes unity, and makes 
a net for every kind of flies. We tie our observations 
together with our theories. We strengthen science by dis- 
cussing facts ; but we must reason on them or they bring 
US' in no food. And the food we need is not barren facts 
for the understanding so much as noble fertile ideas for 
the soul. 

An entomologist who neither knows nor cares to know 
the divine effusions of the Christian heart — who speaks 
with contempt of all philosophy — scoffs at the mention of 
the spiritual — hoots metaphysics out of the academy — and 
is even petulant with his brother nomenclators if they ex- 
press some natural aspirations of the human heart for freer 
space than that afforded by the limits of a memoir on the 
comparative anatomy of JSolotlmria Sinensis or Spirifer 
semiretic^data—su.Gh a naturalist (and there are plenty of 
them) is as ridiculous to the eye of science as is the clergy- 
man who not only does not know but does not want to 
know the normal number of legs in the fly that buzzes 
about his sermon, or in the sedate old lady spider that 
spins in the corner of his ceiling. 

In nothing is the narrowing tendency of mere termino- 
logical natural science more clearly seen in our day than in 



72 ON THE DIGNITY [lECT. 

the copious and often heated discussions to wHch the 
Development Theory as applied to man has given rise. 
At the risk of being accounted either prosy or else unin 
telligible I must endeavour to give some account of this 
theory ;, which, whether right or wrong, is too important to 
be overlooked, too noble to be despised, too nearly related 
to the truth to be treated by friend or foe with anything 
but the highest respect. It is, in fact, a supplement to the 
Nebular Hypothesis. What that proposed to do for the 
worlds in space, the solar system, our earth and its whole 
inorganic constitution, this purposes to do for the organic 
kingdoms, taking the subject of creation up where its 
first chapter ends — where life begins. Together, the two 
theories form one tremendous whole, one scheme of 
thought, the highest reaching after transcendental truth 
which the intellect of man has ever made. 

The subject has been regarded from three points of view. 
Three questions may be asked respecting the. plan of 
creation. One is a German question ; one is a French 
question ; one is an English question. Let them come in 
that order. 

Hegel, the master of modei-n German philosophy until 
recently — and to a greater or less extent all the rest of the 
German metaphysicians — consider matter a mere pheno- 
menon of mind. They believe, as Bishop Berkeley 
taught, that all things are ideas. They ask : What Plan 
had the creative intellect within itself ? What was the 
primeval order of the Creator^'s thoughts ? They say : If 
we can discover that, we need ask no more, for what we 
look at is not real ; things are not what they seem ; 
creation is the dream, the reverie, the phantasia of the 
Infinite IntelHgence. 

Opposed to this transcendental school stands the po- 
sitivism of Comte and his numerous followers, perfectly 
characteristic of French thought, French life, French 
taste, French science. According to this, we know what 
we know because it is knowable fact, because the visible 
universe is a great reality, because its actions towards us 
are genuine and complete instruction. But of God and 
his intelligence we know nothing. The plan of creation 
is a catalogue of the actual sequences and consequences in 
nature. 



IV.] OF MANKIND. 73 

In England, tliat clear, wise, gentle writer of our day, 
Herbert Spencex', is just now busy resuming all tliat a third 
class of thinkers have been saying in what may be called, 
with some propriety an eclectic system ; somewhat uncer- 
tain, as all eclectics must be ; but eminently practical, as 
all Englishmen must also be. On the one hand, they deny 
that we can learn the secrets of the Divine Will ; on the 
other hand, they deny that we can prove the truth of facts 
as everlasting facts. They prefer to say that we can only 
see with the eyes given us and reason with the logic of a 
man. They demand only what is that best mode of organ- 
izing our observations in a reasonable manner so as to 
pi-oduce the most harmonious and satisfying system of 
nature as it seems to us j leaving the questions of reality, 
certainty, divine intention, and all that, entirely out of 
mind for the present. 

You will not be displeased if I decline to enter more 
deeply into explanations or discussions of these various 
philosophic stand-points in a lecture devoted to a special 
subject. It would be easy to point out the nainerous absurd- 
ities and inconsistencies which the uncommitted thinker 
cannot be blind to in their advocates, even while he finds 
himself bending more favourably to one than to another 
according to the constitution of his mind and the subject 
nature of his studies. Yet it is by the counterblasts of 
these three great winds of doctrine that the waves have 
been tossed so high about the double question of the 
Nebular Hypothesis and Development Theory. The grand 
debate is, on the one hand, whether God had any forth- 
going, consistent, consecutive, advancing, and developing 
plan in his own mind before he created the universe ; or 
whether he fixed such a law of development in its nature ; 
or, on the other hand, whether all such supposed plans are 
merely in man^s eye ; the useful but vain endeavour of us 
intelligent spectators to grasp the details of this divine in- 
vention in some systematic mode, to avoid confusing our 
own intelligence. If there be no plan except such as each 
man can feign unto himself, science has nothing to do with 
it. But if there be one, then science cannot rest until it 
be made out precisely, completely. If it be in nature, 
nature will show it by her works, or rather by her growth. 
If it be in God, God will declare it, seriatim, by miracle or 



74 ON THE DIGNITY 



Lr.ECT. 



otherwise. If it be in botli, man cannot fail to learn it 
sooner or later ; even if i^is most perfect comprehension be 
reserved for higher intelligences. 

You will say that this is all words ! words ! I grant it. 
And yet this represents the first stage of the controversy ; 
and makes those who ojBPer ' divine plans ' for considera- 
tion the enemies of those who deny all possibility of a 
divine plan outside of the human mind. The hostility of 
supporters of different divine plans toiuards each other has 
a different foundation. One school accuses the other of 
excluding God from nature; of refusing the Creator access 
to his own creation. The other school retorts that it is 
superstition, not reverence, to require the painful, toil- 
some, endless supervision and revision of the Deity, if his 
work be perfectly constructed at the outset, and full of 
living, moving, renovating, growing forces, like a tree or 
human brain. Between these combatants who can me- 
diate ? None but Deity itself. Science has no argument 
paramount to close the lists or proclaim the victor. Science 
is the study of phenomena, not of essences; the measurer, 
not the explainer of forces ; the observer, not the com- 
prehender of the laws of nature. 

But even when we abandon, as we must, all transcend- 
ental considerations, and confine the subject strictly within 
the pale of science, we still hear vehement debating. If 
we ask men of science whether, when they examine the 
universe, the world we live in, the life of the planet, they 
discover traces of confusion and disorder, they answer 
unanimously, No ! Everything works according to fixed 
laws now ; everything seems to have come into being in an 
orderly manner through all past ages. 

But if we ask them what particular order, or plan, or 
system can be made out according to which the progress 
of events can be classified they begin at once to contra- 
dict each other. 

Eemember that I am only speaking of the world of Hfe, 
of the organic forms of living beings. Setting aside 
minor differences of view among botanists and zoologists 
I will designate three principal divergent theories of the 
development of life upon the planet, based all of them upon 
that record which is written in the rocks, and which you 
will find imperfectly described in the best and latest works 



IV.] OP MANKIND. 75 

on geology. All agree, 1. That there is an evident progress 
in the appearance of higher and higher forms upon the 
planet through the geological ages. All agree_, 2. That 
the exact epoch of the appearance of this or that form can- 
not be made certain; first, because the record in the rocks 
is itself not complete ; and, secondly, because our examin- 
ation of the record is still less complete. New discoveries 
every" day teach us to be careful how we dogmatize about 
one shell having been created before another, or about the 
absolute non-existence of any bird during the previous 
reptilian era, &c. All agree, 3. That a multitude of inter- 
mediate or synthetic types (as they are now called) will be 
discovered, making the series more complete, filling up 
gaps between widely different kinds or genera, to say 
nothing of species, of animals and plants. There have 
lately been found, for instance, fossil horses with deer^s 
feet, mammoths with the marsupial pouch, a lizard with 
feathered wings and tail, showing how little prepared we 
are yet to establish our schedule of organic forms. 

But all agree, nevertheless, 4. That taking what has been 
discovered altogether, there is a marked order in point of 
time not to be mistaken. The most numerous fossils in 
the earliest rocks are corals, sea-weeds, bivalve shells, and 
such low forms of animated nature. In the formations 
over those we find land plants and fishes of low forms in 
vast abundance. In still higher rocks we first find multi- 
tudes of reptiles, and cephalopods among the shells. Still 
later comes the age of birds ; later still that of the mam- 
mals and deciduous trees ; last of all as a characteristic 
feature, man. 

All agree, however, 5. That this order of events is 
general, not special ; and only appears on a grand sketch 
from which a multitude of inconsistent or confusing or 
doubtful details are left out. 

Still all agree, 6. To accept this general system of devel- 
opment as a rude, rough whole ; a kind of blocking out 
the statue ; and that it must mean something. 

But now for what it means. Now they begin to disagree 
coming to particulars. 

The first debate arises over the question of the solidarity 
of the system. One party contending that there is no 
hreak in it. The other party takes exactly the opposite 



76 ON THE DIGNITY [lECT. 

ground^ conteBding that there can be 710 real connection in 
it ; that the breaks in the line are infinite ; that they are 
patent to every eye_, and form in fact the very basis of the 
science of geology. Mr Agassiz has gone so far as to as- 
sert that two fossils, although exactly similar to the human 
eye, cannot be of the same species if they are found in 
different formations however near ; and he has applied 
the same canon to the subject of different localities in one 
agOj afiirming that two shells, although to all appearance 
of the same species, cannot be in reality the same if found 
on both sides of the Atlantic* On the other hand, Mr 
Darwin, following up the arguments of Lord Monboddo, 
M. Lamarck, and Mr Chambers, and followed in his turn 
by Grey, and Huxley, and other first-class botanists and 
zoologists, — Mr Darwin has astonished the world with the 
opinion, that there can be no radical disconnection between 
any two living beings ; and that all geological gaps would 
be filled up and bridged over with intermediate forms if 
our search after them were but sufficiently shrewd and pro- 
tracted. He asserts in fact, that nature started with the idea 
of simple cell -life, which gradually increased, combined, im- 
proved, and perfected itself through an infinity of forms of 
plant and animal, until we see all things as they stand and 
move to-day. Monboddo and Lamarck indeed gave fan- 
ciful accounts of this extensive and mysterious process ; 
applying their theories chiefly to the case of man, to ex- 
plain why he had left the trees or the shore, and how he 
had lost his tail. To the great naturalist of the Pacific 
Ocean belongs the honour of organizing in a reasonable 
manner this side of the question. It has therefore come 
to be known by the name of the Darwinian hypothesis as 
well as by any other. I must refer you to his own descrip- 
tion of that theory of ' Natural Selection,^ by which he 
tries to account for the transition steps along the line of 
change, and to explain the sudden and frequent breaks 
which are apparent in its course. It is a great thought, 
and deserves the honours heaped upon it. And all allow 
that it is true if kept within the regions of variety. But 
whether it be true for actual specific differences, and there- 
fore for changes of genus, family, or class, there are vehe- 

* Mr Conrad, who not two years ago opposed this view as extravagant^ 
now seems inclined to acquiesce in it as probably correct. 



IV.] OF MAKKESTD. 77 

ment disputings. And I can see no mode of settling tliem 
if "we cannot take nature in the very act of exchanging one 
species for another, or converting one species into another. 

The second subject of debate respects the unity of the 
system. Is there but one series; or are there several 
parallel series of organic forms ? 

The Immortal Cuvier established the grand quaternion 
of types which all modern comparative zoology virtually 
accepts. He divided the animal world into Radiata or 
creatures constructed as if branching out from a centre 
in several directions, like star-fish, — Articulata, creatures 
constructed by addition lengthwise, like the worms, — Mol- 
lusca, creatures with two parts symmetrically fitting along 
a vertical line, like the clam, — Vertehrata, creatures with a 
backbone, or, as Agassiz would have it, with two parts 
unsymmetrically fitting along a horizontal line. 

The question then comes up, whether between these 
four plans on which all animals are made there can be 
discovered any logical distinction as to worth or dignity. 
The radiates, it is true, are all low creatures. But among 
the articulates we find the bee ; and among the molluscs 
the cuttlefish, both of them creatures of high breeding and 
intelligence. The great development of brain indeed be- 
longs exclusively to the vertebrates ; but so far as we 
can see, there was yet no inherent impossibility in the at- 
tachment of such a brain to any radiated or annulated body. 
In fact, the backbone of a vertebrate is itself an annulated 
system, giving off nervous branches from a series of gangli- 
onic nodes. It is argued then with some plausibility, that 
these four capital types of animal creation have no com- 
parative dignity in themselves j and that that is an idio- 
syncrasy of man. They are each and all perfectly and 
beautifully adapted to their circumstances, — the mollusca 
to the waters, the articulata to the air, the vertebrata to 
the land, and the radiates to the planes and lines where 
air and land and water meet. It ought not, therefore, to 
be expected that one or other of them should take pre- 
cedency in the creation either in respect to government 
or in respect to seniority. In other words, the earliest 
dawn of life should show us at the same time molluscs 
inhabiting the sea, insects in the air, vertebrates on land, 
aaid radiates where land and water meet. 



78 ON THE DIGNITY [lBCT. 

Now liow stand tlie facts ? In the Potsdam sandstone, 
tlie rock at the base of the Lower Silurian system, and the 
oldest rock in which fossils have been found in both variety 
and abundance, there are multitudes of corals and seaweed, 
multitudes of worms and trilobites_, multitudes of bivalves 
and univalves, and the foot-prints, at least, of vertebrate 
animals, which ' make the representation of all the four 
kingdoms complete. 

If there has been a Darwinian development of animal life 
upon the planet, then it looks as if it had been carried out 
along four lines rather than one. Four stand-points of creat- 
ive energy must have been assumed ; four startings out of 
life must be accounted for ; four mysteries, four miracles, 
four beginnings of creation, to be developed instead of one I 
But where all is mystery and miracle additions are hardly 
noticeable. It becomes Mr Darvvin^s business, then, not only 
to suggest some plausibly rational mode by which one spe- 
cies could gradually or suddenly pass the short interval 
which separates it from another ; his explanation must suf- 
fice to bridge the awful chasms which have always kept 
these four great plans of structure separate along the lines 
of their development. He must show us how an animal of 
radial growth could be developed into one of linear growth. 
Nay, he must fill up the immense interval between the 
plant and the animal ; and, finally, the chasm between the 
atom of carbon or hydrogen, and the nucleated cell of albu- 
men or fibrin. He must explain the genius of life itself before 
he can make his law of natural selection stand for anything 
more than a beautifully-worded description of the ills that 
all flesh falls heir to when it is born upon this planet. How 
it is born upon the planet is another matter and remains 
unexplained by his hypothesis. We do not get rid of mira- 
cles by chasing them back along the ages to the starting- 
point and concentrating them there. A line of battle is 
not necessarily vanquished and annihilated when it is rolled 
up by an attack upon one flank, when there is a reserved 
force at the other end. 

Tou see, this train of argument attacks not so much the 
special statements of the Darwinian hypothesis, as its very 
foundations. It says to Mr Darwin, My dear sir, you have 
foar times as much to do as you thought you had. You 
must not only explain how a man came from a monkey. 



IV.] OF MANKIND. 79 

and a monkey from a squirrel, and a squirrel from a bat, 
and a bat from a bird, and a bird from a lizard, and a lizard 
from a fisli ; but you must suggest some possible means of 
transforming a vertebrate fish out of a shell fish., or out of 
a jelly fish, or out of a lobworm or trilobite ; then you must 
go on to show us how the first trilobite, or the first coral 
animal, or the first rhizopod was obtained by your process 
of natural selection out of still earlier vegetable species. 
ISTay, you cannot even stop there. You must explain the 
very first appearance of living tissue out of the inorganic 
elements of dead matter. The world is not a unit ; it is 
like the magic ivory balls of the Chinese shops, globes 
within globes, worlds within worlds — all visible through 
the holes in each other's peripheries. 

Now what is the Darwinian answer to this objection, de- 
rived from Cuvier's foar-fold classification of the animal 
kingdom ? This : — Ouvier may not have made an abso- 
lutely perfect classification. There may be intermediate 
forms, which we cannot yet be certain where to place; 
which, when discovered, will fall as naturally under one 
plan as under another. We are not yet quite sure that 
there are just four distinct and sharply defined lines of 
living type-form ; we are not sure that nature lays out her 
work in lines at all. She is not as linear, at all events, as 
our literality would have her be. 

There is a just tendency in the new schools to establish 
rather a circular classification. The great disciple of Cuvier, 
whom you have had the good fortune to attach to your 
own city and university, and whose impulse all American 
sciencehas been feeling now for twenty years, has elucidated 
the four types of animal life and their common appearance 
at the beginning in lectures which he has delivered in this 
room. I have not the courage even to saunter through 
the meadows which he owns. I refer you to his own 
masterly arguments. He is a vehement anti-Darwinian. 
But even against this master of the subject I must warn 
you. He has great opponents. And the most recent dis 
coveries are also against him. There have lately been dis- 
covered infinitely older fossils than those I just now al- 
luded to in the Potsdam sandstone. I hold in my hand a 
specimen of the oldest fossil in the world ; and lo, it is a 
rhizopod, a creature belonging to the very lowest forms of 



80 ON THE DIGNITY [lECT. 

life. It is true these lowest forms are peculiarly fitted for 
preservation in the fossil state ; others of higher form may 
have co-existed with them and been destroyed. But when 
we see these lowest of all known forms standing alone at 
the very beginning of time, and man, the highest and 
noblest form, appearing at the end, and an unmistakable 
gradation, always upward, through the long ages, and 
along all the four lines of plan — what open mind can help 
imbibing, if not the Darwinian doctrine, at least the spirit 
of the Theory of Development ? 

But this leads me to the third head of the discussion : 
the always upvjard direction of the development of life- 
forms. This also has not been left unquestioned. One of 
the most popular and powerful thinkers that geology ever 
owned was the lamented Hugh Miller. Large-minded 
and erudite, trained by patient personal investigation in 
the field, with a great brain and a great love of truth, he 
was also a religious enthusiast, bigotedly orthodox in the 
sense of Geneva. His views therefore as a speculative 
geologist were peculiar, but none the less woithy of con- 
sideration, for they insisted upon the introduction of such 
exceptional phenomena as the advocates of the Develop- 
ment Theory were too much inclined to ignore. He op- 
posed the theory ; and upon the ground that it was not 
complete ; that not only were there breaks in the series of 
life-forms which could not be got over, but actual reversals 
of direction. He argued for a law of development actually 
downwards, or backwards, as well as for a law of develop- 
ment forwards and upwards. It is true that he made the 
law of degeneracy subordinate ; but he still insisted that 
it was not exceptional, but universal, and included in the 
other. His notion was, that life advanced not in an ob- 
liquely rising straight line but in a succession of higher and 
higher parabolic curves. Each type as a whole he allowed 
to be nobler than the type preceding it, but not in every 
part or throughout its whole career. He preferred to 
imagine each type beginning below the maximum dignity 
of the type preceding it; then rising forward to a maximum 
dignity superior to that of the type preceding it ; then 
falling away, degenerating and decaying to extinction. 
He instanced our varieties of fruits and the rise and decay 
of famihes of men as examples of this law subject to 



IV.] OF MANKIND. 81 

inspection in our day. Including size and number among 
ttie elements of dignity lie showed liow the fossil Irish elk 
excelled in size and strength any now-existing ruminant; 
how the cave-bear^ the aurochs, the mammoth, the Siva- 
lensian turtle, the dinodon, each and all excelled the bears 
and oxen, elephants, turtles, and kangaroos of the present 
day ; how the mosses of the coal-measures were as large 
as our trees; the frogs of the middle secondary age as 
large as modern elephants. Each age, said he, has been 
indeed an advance upon the previous age, and has brought 
forth new illustrations and finer ones of the Creator^'s 
skill. But each age has had its own superior glories not 
to be dimmed by any exhibitions of a later date. Each 
type has been quite perfect in itself, was made entirely 
suitable for the time and place of its creation ; rose up to 
power; took full possession of its whole inheritance; grew 
to its utmost size ; completely did its work ; but when its 
time was past fell off and withered ; grew small and weak 
and perished to give place to the next type, ordained to 
a like destiny. The appearance of man upon the earth, 
clad in beauty, armed with dominion, but after a time of 
glory falling from his first estate and becoming savage 
and degenerate, seemed to his eyes a natural illustration 
of this law. And in like manner he would explain the 
coming of Christ at the end of the old dispensation ; and 
the rise of the Christian Church followed by its decay. In 
the same spirit he anticipated a millennium, and the appear- 
ance of angelic men perhaps to fall in tarn like L"-cifer 
and all his angels. 

Geologists read Hugh Miller^s book with as much de- 
light as do other people. But they do not accept his 
Theory of Development ; the facts on which it was ap- 
parently based, when critically examined, do not sustain 
it. And every geologist must feel that such a theory could 
never have been suggested by a summary of all known 
facts relating to the subject to any mind not prepossessed 
by a certain set of theological ideas. It was the last 
struggle of orthodoxy against natural science embodied in 
geology. Orthodoxy may well be proud of its advocate 
and apotheosize his memory; but no cause could be 
won so. 

I would not dare to go into a detailed discussion of the 



82 ON THE DIGNITY [lECT. 

doctrine of development this evening. The literature of 
the subject is already copious_, learned, well and clearly 
argued, and within easy reach of every one who feels 
desirous to arrive at some conclusion. I have only aimed 
at stating the question, and suggesting that it is an open 
question not only between theologians and geologists but 
between one class of men of science and another, and that 
it ought to be no bugbear in the path of generous and 
truthful minds. 

The aim of the Creator seems to be to fill out all the 
possible details of his great plan^ to realize all p.ossible 
plans, modes, conditions, forms, powers, accidents, and 
relations. The highest artist wears the least mannerism. 
Infinite variety is the clue to the labyrinth of the universe. 
Infinite variety is in fact the only law of natural history 
as yet fully and completely established to the satisfaction 
of the mind of the naturalist. It has been made the law 
of every individual life. 

First let us look within. Does not our education pro- 
ceed by alternate synthesis and analysis of perceptions ? 
We collect facts ; we combine and compare them ; we 
perceive their likeness, and discover what we call laws. 
Then we take these synthetic laws, and go to work again, 
seeking new illustrations and confirmations of theru. In- 
stead of that we perceive exceptions and denials. We learn 
to contrast and discover difierences; we analyze, or separ- 
ate, or tear to pieces what we had put together and con- 
solidated. We have to do it. We find that bad bricks 
have got into our wall ; inharmonious tints have been 
chosen for our pattern. We build, we weave again, now 
more successfully. Thus we advance • thus we enrich our 
life, the world, and history. 

Turning our eyes again towards God, do we not see 
Him at the same kind of alternate synthetic and analytic 
creation ? Herbert Spencer calls it the law of Differentia- 
tion ; and shows n^ how the forces of matter first aggre- 
gate and then disintegrate the solid parts of the world, 
condensing the gases, combining the bases, dissolving the 
salts, crystalizing the deposits, tearing down the moun- 
tains, building up the valleys, alternately consolidating and 
dispersing, arranging and disturbing, forming and re- 
forming, until that variety has been produced which char- 



IV.] OF MANKIND. 83 

^cterizes the present state of things. He shows how the 
present variety of human society has been accomplished 
on the same principles; the endless variety of art^ of 
thought. 

But we are only concerned now in seeing how truly the 
law holds good in Natural History proper. Whether we 
suppose one or another classification best^ it all comes to 
this in the end : every nook and cranny of the world has 
got itself somehow filled with living forms, all fashioned 
agreeably to the circumstances of the place of their exist- 
ence. As these circumstances vary infinitely, so must the 
living forms.* If there be an apparent advancement and 
•ennoblement of living forms through the ages, it must be 
dependent in some reasonable manner upon some slow ad- 
vancing movement in the physics of the globe with which 
the living forms must stand in amicable harmony. In 
geology therefore there must be some explanation for all 
the phenomena of paleontology. If man did not exist 
until quite recently, we must conclude that the earth was 
not prepared for him till recently. And so of all the other 
and lower creatures. This teaches us the needlessness of 
any transcendental treatment of the development theory ; 
and the wisdom of those who keep the discussion of it 
down to pure Natural History facts. 

One of the most remarkable and important consequences 
of the law of Differentiation bears directly upon the his- 
tory of Man. Differentiation is not only the production of 
variety, but the production of multitude. Both are de- 
pendent (but in different ways) upon the bewildering net- 
work of cross acting physical forces which support and 
also destroy life. If these physical forces actually produce 
living forms, we see at once that they must generate them 
in multitudinous crowds. If they do not, but only sus- 
tain them and destroy them, we see that the Creator was 
under a physical necessity to place in existence great mul- 
titudes of living forms if he desired any of them to con- 
tinue to exist. This is true not only respecting the mul- 

* If there be 90 per cent, of carbonate of lime in the sea, there must 
be a vast over-proportion of infusorial forms to appropriate it, while 
a corresponding proportion of infusorial life of another kind appropriates 
the remaining 10 per cent, of silica. (See Jukes' Manual, p. 134, 135, f.) 



84 ON THE DIGNITY [lECT. 

titude of individuals, but respecting the multitude of 
varieties or species. 

What do we see, then, when we look around us ? First, 
as to the multitude of individuals. There are supposed, 
indeed, to be a thousand millions of human beings on the 
earth : but this is nothing. There are a thousand millions 
of mosquitoes in a single swamp. Each female fish pro- 
duces a million of young fry per annum. Is this a law of 
life ? Yes ! but it is still more a law of death. The final 
cause of this fecundity must be discovered rather among 
the destroying agencies of nature than among its sustain- 
ing harmonies. We notice, therefore, that those animals 
are most prolific whose individual lives are least secure ; 
and these are what we call the lowest forms of life. We 
call them so because daily wholesale destruction gives us 
the sense of waste and consequently of worthlessness. 
These are the forms which would exist during the earlier 
and more adventurous days when quaking lands and hiss- 
ing seas and steam-filled skies made the vexed earth a 
most unnatural mother ; quite unsafe to trust her with 
children of a riper nature than corals and sea-weed. 

What is true of the multitudes of individuals is equally 
and for the same reason true of the multitudes of specific 
forms. Each species has a habitat and is fitted to it. The 
development theory supposes the habitat to have fitted up 
its own specific forms. Whether that supposition be true 
or false matters little ; the fact remains unchanged in 
either case that each change of circumstances causes, or 
necessitates, or is accompanied by, some specific differ- 
ence. Now if an animal can only change its nature to 
suit a change in its circumstances it need not perish. 
But this is a high faculty, scarcely exercised by any plant 
or animal excepting man and a few of the mammalia which 
keep about him. Even these exert the power of adapta- 
tion so imperfectly that they are sure to perish in the long 
run when taken from one climate to another ; and man 
himself can only accomplish the immense feat of per- 
manent migration at the risk of individual destruction, and 
by calling to his help the whole physical, intellectual, and 
spiritual worlds to be his body guards. 

Nature grants the right of selecting its own food to 
every creature that consents to remain within the limits of 



OF MANKIND. 



85 



IT.] 

its own "habitat. There and there only nature lias provided 
exactly for the demands of its stomach., and its stomach is 
the wise guardian of the interests of the rest of its consti- 
tution. Liberty is perfect, because the necessary and the 
pleasant can be secured by the mere exercise of will. Mi- 
gration must destroy or at least limit this freedom of the 
will. The animal that invades territory destined to sup- 
port the life of other animals unlike its own finds poisons 
when it seeks for meat, and must endure the consequences. 
'Tis now a choice of evils. The right to roam and choose 
at its own sweet will is gone. The will is now subjected 
by a judgment rendered anxious and unhappy by self-evi- 
dent want of harmony between its suffering desires and 
nature's strange provisions. To this law all animals must be 
subjected which attach themselves to man. But in the high- 
est degree it is the key to the development of man in history. 
The wider the migration, the greater the embarrassment, 
the keener the suffering ; the more subjected the will, the 
more unfolded the intellect and passions ; for hunger is 
fierce and cunning, while satiety is unobservant as an oyster 
and gentle as a lamb. 

Thus it happens that every possible slightest shade of 
variation in the conditions of existence must be a trump 
of doom, or else must be provided against in the plan of 
the Creation by some equally subtile variation in the 
organs of life. This is the only explanation for that in- 
credible number of specific forms distinguishable among 
the lowest ranks of animated nature. Think of it ! A 
German entomologist has made out 820 species of insects 
preserved in the pieces of amber which form his cabinet, 
all of them, mites, gnats, mosquitoes, proboscidians or 
sucking flies, who met their fate by sticking fast in a gum 
which exuded from trees of tertiary age, growing in moist 
low places sheltered from the wind. Of all these species 
only 30 were such as now belong to the mosquito tribes of 
Europe ; 100 were species which we have at present living 
in America ; but not one out of the whole 820 was like any 
of the numerous species of mosquitoes known in the south 
of Africa. 

Think again of the numberless species of corals belong- 
ing only to one age. Mr Sydney S. Lyons' cabinet of 
Devonian and Silurian crinoids at Louisville, in Kentucky, 



86 ON THE DIGNITY [lECT. 

magnificently furnished as it is with genera and species, 
gives but a faint conception of the multitudes of separate 
beautiful forms which specify the various physical condi- 
tions under which that family of the radiated animals has 
struggled so bravely^ but often so unsuccessfully,, to con- 
tinue to exist. 

But as we approach our own times, and a quieter bosom 
gives suck to worthier embodiments of the wisdom of the 
divine, more self-sustaining, more adaptable to circum- 
stances, more hardy, more migratory, or more inventive, 
we see how these countless multitudes become more moder- 
ate swarms, vast herds become small flocks, flocks turn 
to single pairs. Life has grown safe. A genus need no 
longer put forth its hundred specific forms, like tentacles, 
to cling withal to the tempestuous earth. Instead of one 
bear for the summer and another for the winter, one bear 
will do for both provided he may hybernate. One set of 
birds for north and south will be enough, if you will teach 
them to migrate twice every year. Let man be but a 
single species, yet if you give him a tyiind to be his own 
tailor, shoemaker, house-carpenter, shipbuilder, farmer, 
and gunsmith, he may inhabit the whole earth from pole 
to pole. This is the great argument for unity of species 
in the case of man ; a subject, however, to be taken up in 
my next lecture. We are speaking now of the dignity of 
man ; and of the likelihood that his numbers will be small 
in inverse proportion to his powers of resistance to those 
fatal forces of surrounding life, beneath the blows of which 
all meaner images of God have been in past times over- 
thrown and utterly destroyed. 

It is this ability of man to protect himself against nature 
that afi'ords us an explanation of the paucity of his remains 
as fossilized. For, in the first place, as I have just ex- 
plained, the race of man has been a scanty race. And, in 
the second place, the individual man has been a cmm.ing 
fellow, always on his guard : foresighted against the ma- 
licious tricks and brutal damages of nature ; wisely sus- 
picious of the quagmires and quicksands in which the 
stupid mammoths were entombed ; prompt to devise ex- 



IV.] OF MANKIND. 87 

pedients for recovery in disaster_, and^ above all, able to 
form leagues for mutual life insurance. Yet with, all Ms 
superior advantage nature was sometimes too mucli for 
bim. As I narrated in my last lecture, men bave been 
fossilized just like inferior brutes. As tbe eruption of 
Vesuvius in Pliny's days caugbt a few sleepers and a 
sick man or two wben all tbe rest of tbe inhabitants of 
Herculaneum and Pompeii made good tbeir escape ; so in 
an age immensely older tban tbe pyramids, a torrent of 
volcanic mud captured one of tbe flying aborigines of cen- 
tral France, part of wbose skeleton is now in tbe museum 
of Le Puy. Tbe crater from wbicb tbe torrent came be- 
longs to a group tbe fires of wbicb bave been extinct since 
tbe days wben tbe rhinoceros and lion were at home in 
western Europe before tbe glacial epoch. 

Tbe care which men have always taken to secure the bodies 
of their relatives and friends from decay has been tbe chief 
cause of tbeir utter disappearance from tbe earth. Reli- 
gious veneration has produced tbe same effect in ages wben 
dead bodies were burned instead of buried. Tbe supersti- 
tious dread of being devoured by wild beasts after death 
has caused many races to suspend tbeir corpses in baskets 
from tbe boughs of trees, ensuring speedy dissolution. 
Yet the buried bones of ancient heroes, as we bave already 
seen, have been occasionally exhumed by floods and swept 
into caves and buried again in a broad common alabaster 
sarcophagus in tbe most effectual manner. 

In spite, then, of tbe paucity of human beings to be fos- 
silized, and in spite of tbe care wbicb they bave always 
taken not to be fossilized, they bave not always escaped 
fossilization. But tbe conditions under wbicb human fos- 
silization became possible were so hard to realize that every 
case was an exception to that law which has made the strata 
of tbe earth so many cemeteries of tbe past, so many 
museums for tbe present. Every new discovery of a fossil 
human bone of ancient date is a sort of natural miracle 
wrought specially for science. 

In studying out man's role in tbe great drama of the 
Development of Animal Life we depend greatly upon 
these precious relics of bis existence in an older era than 
tbe present. But in determining man's relative dignity 
in the grand scale of animal life we bave other and abund- 



88 ON THE DIGNITY [lECT. 

ant materials for thougjit. That scale not only ascendB 
through all the ages, but stands to-day before us. The 
earth is still crowded with the representatives of most of 
the departed forms. Details are changed^ but Natural 
History continues still the same. Man can be classified by 
what he is_, as well as by what he has been. If we need 
see all that he can be, we need but travel from land to 
land, from city to country, from continent to island, from 
field to forest, from mountain to desert, from the ice-fields 
of Greenland to the jungles of India and the swamps of 
the gulf of Guinea; everywhere some new variety of man 
will offer itself for our examination, — surrounded by as 
various forms of lower life with which to be compared. 

In spite of all this wealth of opportunity zoologists have 
found it a most difficult task to give an adequate and satis- 
factory definition of the animal called Man. 

' Linnaeus led the way in this field of inquiry by compar- 
ing man and the apes in the same manner as he compared 
these last with the Carnivores, Ruminants, Rodents, or 
any other division of warm-blooded quadrupeds. After 
several modifications of his original scheme, he ended by 
placing Man as one of the many genera in his Order 
Primates, which embraced the apes and lemurs, and also 
the bats ; for he found these last to be nearly allied to some 
of the lowest forms of monkeys. But all those modern 
naturalists who retain Linngeus's order Primates, agree to 
exclude the bats (cheiroptera), and most of them class 
Man as one of the families of this order Primates.''* 

Blumenbach (following Linnaeus in 1779) proposed, on 
the other hand, to separate Man entirely from the Mon- 
keys. He called the latter ' fourhanded ' quadrumana. 
His definition of Man was short and simple enough : 
animal, erectum, himanum. Bufi'on had used the same 
terms in a somewhat different way 13 years before. 
Ouvier used them again 12 years later. He placed the 
apes^ monkeys, and lemurs together in one gi'and order, 
and man in another order by himself. 

In spite of the authority of these four great names, 
modern zoologists have preferred to make man stand alone, 
not indeed as an order, but simply as a family. Professor 

* Lyell, Ant. of Man, ch. xxiv. / 



IV.3 OP MANKIND. 89 

Huxley * even repudiates the very term quadrumanous. 
He takes the ground that the hind extremities of monkeys, 
apes, and lemurs, bear no true resemblance at all to the 
hand of man. They are in all respects not hands but feet. 
On the other side he affirms that there is no anatomical 
difference of type between the hand of a gorilla and the 
hand of a man. The hand of the gorilla is merely clum- 
sier, heavier, and furnished with a shorter thumb. The 
foot of the gorilla he shows to possess also the three char- 
acteristic features of the human foot : 1. By the same 
arrangement of the tarsal bones ; 2. By the presence of 
the same short flexor muscle and short extensor muscle of 
the digits ; and, 3. By the presence of the same peculiar 
muscle called the peronceus longus. The only difi'erence 
which can be mentioned is merely formal, viz. that the 
great toe of the gorilla is more movable than mane's. In 
fact, there would be, according to this, less difi'erence 
between the extremities of man and the gorilla than 
between those of the gorilla and orang-outang ;t and yet 
others of the monkey tribe have still more widely diver- 
gent extremities. 

In like manner a comparison of the teeth of man with 
those of the apes and monkeys has failed to establish them 
in separate orders. '' The number of teeth in the gorilla 
and in all the Old World monkeys, except the lemurs, is 
32, the same number as in man. The general pattern of 
the crown of the tooth is also the same. All the American 
apes, however, have 38 teeth. The only real distinction 
between the jaw of the apes and the human jaw consists 
in the fact that the eye-teeth of the apes project almost 
like tusks.^ 

If we institute a like comparison as to other portions of 
the frame we are led to the same results. There are 
sometimes remarkable differences between one human race 

* Uuxley's third ' Lecture on the motor organs of man compared 
with those of other animals/ R. School of Mines (March, 1861), embo- 
died in his 'Evidence as to man's place in Nature.' Williams and 
Norgate, Loudon, 1864. [In Lyell, Ant. of Man, ch. xxiv.] 

■\ The thumb of the oraug differs by its shortness and absence of any 
special long flexor muscle from that of a gorilla more than it differs from 
that of man. The carpus of the orang and of most of the lower apes 
contains nine bones; that of a chimpanzee, gorilla, and man, only eight. 



90 ON THE DIGNITY. [lECT. 

and anotlier. Two years ago^ .Dr Broca^ tlie Secretary of 
tlie Anthropological Society of Paris^, was good enough to 
show me nearly 100 human skeletons which he had recently 
procured from a cave of the Stone age, discovered by an 
English gentleman in preparing a park for his new country- 
house about ten leagues north-east of Paris. Dr Broca 
pointed out to me one striking peculiarity in the anatomy of 
the arm-bones of this ancient race. There was a round 
foramen pierced through the thin curtain of bone which 
connects the two processes at the elbow. He assured me 
that he had examined hundreds of arm-bones obtained from 
cemeteries of the Merovingian age, but none of them ex- 
hibited this hole. Nor is it to be found in the modem 
human skeleton, except among the Hottentots. But it is 
a characteristic mark of the ape and monkey anatomy. 

There is a fourth ground of comparison. If we can 
learn nothing from the hands, the feet, the teeth, the bones, 
cannot we succeed better by comparing the shape and the 
size of the skull with its containing brain ? Professor 
Dana, of New Haven, dissatisfied like the rest with all other 
tests, finds refuge in this. He thinks he has established 
for the whole range of life -development a common law, 
which he names the law of Cephalization. All animal 
forms are worth precisely their weight of train. Man is 
the noblest creature because in him the digestive and the 
locomotive systems become at last subordinate to the per- 
ceptive and the reasoning faculties. I cannot give you the 
details of his ingenious reasoning. The tendency of zoology 
has for a long time been to this conclusion. But even 
here there appears no distinction of kind but only of 
degree. 

Owen, in 1857, unable, as he says, to appreciate or con- 
ceive of the distinction between the psychical phenomena 
of a chimpanzee and of a Boschisman, or of an Aztec with 
arrested brain-growth, proclaimed his return to Blumen- 
bach^'s and Cuvier^s old classification, making man a 
separate sub-class, based upon three cerebral characters. 
Owen^s assertion was that man differs from the three 
mammalian classes, represented by the ape, the beaver, 
and the kangaroo, — 1. in the overlapping of his cerebral 
hemispheres forward so as to cover the olfactory lobes, and 
backward so as to cover and quite conceal the cerebellum. 



IV.] or MANKIND. 91 

when looked down upon from above; 2. In the presence 
of what is called the ' posterior horn of the lateral ven- 
tricle ; ' andj 3. In the addition to the hind lobe of each 
hemisphere of what is called the ' hijppocamjpus tninor.'^ 

Upon the publication of this theory a storm arose. It 
was shown that Owen's picture of the brain of a chimpanzee, 
which he took from a Dutch work_, printed in 1849_, and on 
which he based his comparison, was worthless, because it 
had been drawn from a shrunk specimen. M. Grratiolet, 
' the highest authority in cerebral anatomy of our age,' 
showed by new drawingsf from fresh specimens, that no 
such distinctions between the brain forms of man and the 
chimpanzee could at all be made out. The human brain 
which he dissected was that of a Bushwoman exhibited in 
London. He showed that the human and the simian 
brains, however convoluted in man, however smooth in the 
marmoset, instead of having Owen's distinctions, have four 
grand characters in common : 1. a rudimentary olfactory 
lobe; 2. A posterior lobe, not uncovering, but completely 
covering the cerebellum ; 3. A well-defined 'fissure of 
Silvius ; ' and, 4. A posterior horn in the lateral ventricle. 

To settle the dispute which, upon this, broke out afresh 
fifteen genera of Old World and New World apes and 
monkeys dying in the Zoological Gardens of London 
were dissected ; representing almost all the forms in dis- 
pute, from that of the chimpanzee the next to man, to 
that of the lemur farthest reraoved from man. The con- 
clusion arrived at from these and from other Continental 
examinations which were made at the same time was, that 
Owen's distinctions had no foundation in point of fact.f 

Nothing remains but 'the superior volume of the hutnan 
brain, 1. Absolutely, i. e. when compared with the volume 
of the ape's brain ; and, 2. Relatively, i. e. when we com- 
pare the brain of a man with the bulk and weight of his 
body ; and the brain of a"h ape with the bulk and weight of 
its body. 

Now Professor Huxley says that, so far as he is aware, 

_ * Owen, Proc. Lirni. Soc. Lond., vol. viii. p. 20. Archencephala was 
his new sub-class name. (Lyell, Ant. Man, xsiv. p. '481.) 

t The false and true drawings are placed opposite each other in 
Lyell, pp. 482, 483. 

t See RoUiston's summary on p. 489 of Lyell. 



92 OJJ THE DIGNITY [lECT. 

no human adult cranium contains less than 62 cubic inches, 
and that the most capacious gorilla skull measured no more 
than 34| ; a difference between them of say two to one — a 
tremendous difference ! The difference between the small- 
est human skull measured by Morton^ viz. 63 cubic inches, 
and the largest human skull, which measured 114/ is also 
something tremendous — nearly two to one. If volume of 
brain then be the criterion, the mathematical statement 
of man^s relation to the ape will be expressed by the series 

114 : 63 : 34|. 
But the series will not be complete until we add the size 
of the smallest gorilla adult skull yet measured, which was 
24 cubic inches. It is, you see, a descending series, and 
nothing more — 114 : 63 : 34^ : 24. We may add, however, 
still lower figures, and keep very nearly the same propor- 
tions from among the crania of the lower orders of apes. 

Language is no criterion, for every animal has a language 
of its own. The sense of the ridiculous is possessed by 
brutes, who laugh with their eyes, or tail, if not with their 
whole face as man does. The faculty of worship in itself 
is no distinction ; for the devotion of a dog to his master, 
of a lover to his mistress, of a Christian to his Saviour, of 
an angel to his God, has the same essential root so far as 
we can see. Susceptibility to improvement is not peculiar 
to man ; nor the natural law by which there occurs an he- 
reditary accumulation of acquired powers. This also, and 
all the before-mentioned criteria are only available for a 
difference in degree, but not for a difference in kind, distin- 
guishing man above the rest of the creation. 

When we notice the intelligence of the dog and the ele- 
phant whose type of brain is more remote from man, and 
see how they manifest the possession of the moral faculties, 
displaying, as they do, the sense of shame, of justice, of 
loyalty, of compassion, we find out how little distance our 
reasoning can go ; how imperfect 'are our data, how myste- 
rious are the functions of all brain matter, how temperate 
we ought to be in entertaining convictions in regard to the 
relationship of man to other animals, how sound and high 
our hope of self-improvement should become, and what 
grandeur resides in the Apostle's words — ' forgetting the 
things that are behind, and pressing forward to those that 
are before/ 



IV.] OF MANKIND. 93 

Here_, as in so many other similar caseSj science is en- 
tirely at fault — Rasselas sitting at the foot of the wall 
that surrounds his happy .valley. I think I can see 
around me in society sufficient evidences that man is a de- 
veloped monkey. But what of that ? Shall a wise man 
kill himself for shame because his ancestor^ ten generations 
back removed^ was hung for felony ? What does it con- 
cern us that our naked and painted forefathers danced their 
devilish orgies round shrieking victims set on fire in towers 
of wicker-work^ making night hideous and the angels hide 
their faces in pity, horror, and disgust! I confess, for my 
own part, aside from all considerations of actual science, I 
like to see every tub stand upon its own bottom. This 
pride of civilization seems to me the pride of parvenus. 
If mankind were originally apes, they have at all events 
acquired the right to be so no longer. The ape-like skull 
of the Stone age has been replaced by the skull of the'^.oet, 
the philosopher and the statesman. Let us be satisfied; 
Christ has come. I only wish that I could present before 
your eyes as a worthy close to our train of thought to-night 
a picture of some aboriginal savage of the Stone age, and 
then, in divine contrast to its humiliating ugliness and base 
brutality, a copy of that immortal statue of the highest 
type of man, the Christ of Dannecker. I see you love, 
like the old Grreeks to adorn your city and honour your 
great men with statues : why have you not indulged your- 
selves in the joy of having always before your eyes the 
wonder of the age-^the greatest statue of the greatest 
Being of all ages ? St Petersburg has obtained a copy of 
it in marble. Why should Boston be behind St Peters- 
burg ? It is worth an annual pilgrimage to Stuttgard to 
behold it. Such majesty ! such tenderness ! such intellect 
and wisdom in the brow and face ! Such grace and beauty 
in the form seen through the flowing robe ! Of more than 
mortal size, it seems no more than man — no less than all 
the blessed gospels say of him ! the flower of the long de- 
velopment ! the very incarnation of the Deity. 



LECTUEB y. 

ON THE imiTT OF MANKIND. 

We are now to consider wliat light tlie modern sciencea 
can throw upon tlie question of tlie oneness or the many- 
ness of mankind. 

It has been common to use with great looseness of 
meaning the terms race, family, species, in their applica- 
tion to mankind. 

The ^race of man^ is contrasted with the animal races 
and the race of angels — the word race being the English. 
form of the Latin word radix, root, and implying a common 
origin to all the human inhabitants of this planet. 

The '^ human species ■' is an expression even more common 
in late hterature than the ' human race,^ but quite as in- 
definite. The word species in Latin {specto, spy, &c.), 
like the word speech isprechen) in English, has reference 
to the expression of the inner nature outwardly upon the 
face and form so that it can be understood and sympa- 
thized with. 

The ' human family ' is an expression merely implying 
the common interests of mankind as against the forest 
and the flood, wild beasts and hostile elements ; while it 
includes the ideas of possible fraternity, consanguinity, 
intermarriage, and fellowships of every spiritual grade. 
When the apostle wrote ' for of one blood he hath made 
all the dwellers upon earth •* he shared the indefinite no- 
tions of that and every other age, and expressed his Chris- 
tian philanthropy in the usual way, quite sufficient for his 
purpose. 

Our inquiry is of another order. Science is obliged to 
restrict words to one meaning. At the outset of a mathe- 
matical discussion the value of a; is unknown; but at the 
close of it the value of x is made out to be some one 



ON THE UNITY OF MANKIND. 95 

-certain quantity, and no other. We have aot yet made 
out the value of x in the discussion of species. We still 
use the terms race and family in a loose way. We talk of 
the various races of mankind — the black race, the white 
race, the yellow race, the red race. We even subdivide 
these, and speak of four or five black races, i. e. the Caribs 
of S. America, the blacks of Northern Africa, the blacks of 
Southern Africa, the Negrito race of the Andaman islands, 
and the Milanesians of the Eastern Archipelago. Some- 
times our subdivisions become small and numerous ; e. g. 
we divide the white race into the Arian and Shemitic 
branches ; and then subdivide the Shemitic branch into 
the Hebrew, the Arabic, the Coptic, the Phoenician, and 
other races. Ethnologists, therefore, differ in their classi- 
fication of human races so much, that the number ranges 
from three to thirty. The questions which start up for 
their consideration are questions of detail, and the word 
race has in common ethnology got to confining itself to 
these details. 

But it carries a larger significance ; it has the same 
scope with the word species, with this difference : viz. that 
the word species reminds us of other animals beside man 
.and excites the question of their possible consanguinity 
with him; while the word race excites only the question 
of one man's relationship to another. 

My lecture this evening will therefore deal with these 
two subjects : race and species ; or, in other words, with the 
distinctions of human races, and their origins. I state it 
in this form, so as to get rid of the transcendental discus- 
sion of species per se, which would absorb the whole even- 
ing and lead us to no results after all. And I take them 
in this reversed order of time because I do not behove in 
a priori science. We must take existing facts first and 
argue back from them to what has been fact in times past. 

But before investigating the facts of the case, I must 
state the condition of our apparatus for the investigation. 
Taking the sciences in their order : what means do they 
afford us for determining the unity of the human race ? 

From the group of the mathematical sciences we get our 
calculations of the increase of human population ; our 
knowledge of the relations established between physical 
geography and human migrations ; and between climate 



96 ON THE CNITT [lECT. 

and character. We get also certain wonderful glimpses 
into the mystery of change of organic form, whicli-, whether 
retained by the Creator in his own hand^ or deposited by 
him as an efficient cause in nature, is in any view you 
may take of it the great central subject of this investiga- 
tion. 

From the group of the inorganic sciences we receive the 
discussion of facts only hinted at in the last lecture ; the 
fossil remains of primeval men and of contemporaneous 
animals, and, moreover, our ideas of time. 

From the organic sciences we get our laws of species- 
variation j laws which rule over both kingdoms^ the veget- 
able and the animal, and therefore over man. Compara- 
tive anatomy, describing its collections, defines for us the 
limits of similarity and dissimilarity between the fossil 
species and those now existing ; between the monkey 
tribes and the tribes of mankind ; between the skulls found 
in the bone-caverns, and the skulls of Casper Hauser and 
Daniel Webster ; between the skeleton and the skin of 
Hottentots and of Englishmen. 

From the historical sciences, of which Ethnology is one, 
we get those facts which, on the one hand, teach the per- 
manence of those great distinctions upon which our largest 
classification of human races is founded ; and, on the other 
hand, teach those easy and rapid modifications of the human 
form and featu.res, throtigh civilization or decivilization, 
which may well make us libei'al in our judgments both 
towards those who insist upon one Adam from whom all 
blacks and whites, yellow men and red men have descended, 
and also towards those who insist upon the generation of 
man from the ape. Herewith come in those volumes of 
archseological suggestions ; pictures of men and dogs ni^on 
the- tombs of the Pharaohs ; images of ancient Hindu and 
Chinese deities ; skeletons of Greeks and Romans, Gauls 
and Finns buried in tombs and tumuli of every age back 
through the Modern, the Iron, the Bronze, and the Stone 
periods. Surely we ought to be able to come to some con- 
clusion, however modestly, as to whether mankind is and 
has always been of one race ; and whether there are signs 
of a transition from degraded ape-like forms up to the 
noblest figure of a man. But the list of our opportumties 
is not yet complete. 



v.] OP MANKIND. 97 

From the social sciences we get statistics, not only of 
tlie present, but of the past conditions of human life ; we 
see how the arts and arms of men have come into existence 
and been improved, increased, and perfected, in striking 
parallelism with human form and human intellect ; part of 
that development of the idea of man, which itself forms 
but a part of a still grander development of the idea of 
universal nature. The study of ancient commerce reflects 
light upon the theory of migrations, and helps to distin- 
guish the characteristics of races. The study of ancient 
war is, in fact, the tracing of migrations as they became 
accomplished facts, influencing mixtures of races, and ex- 
plaining the reappearance of Mongol faces in Western 
Pennsylvania. By the study of ancient law (as the mag- 
nificent book of Maine, just published, proves) we get 
laws of natural selection, which even Darwin hardly 
dreamed of; by which races were subdivided, and new 
foi'ms contracted for, to become permanent in after times. 

Lastly, from the intellectual sciences, we learn: 1. how 
to distinguish the races of mankind through language, 
and to track them in their later marchings and counter- 
marchings across the continents and seas; 2. how to dis- 
tinguish races by their fine arts, their ethics, their wor- 
ships ; but above all, 3. we get some clear notion of man^s 
relation to the brute, and are thus enabled to introduce 
into the purely materialistic discussion of the development 
theory, based on fossils and on comparative anatomy, 
those higher considerations which naturally and properly 
must have most weight with sensible, religious, Christian 
people. 

The last condition of mankind, namely, that in which 
we see it now existing, resembles the last condition of the 
rock-crust of the earth, namely, that in which we see it 
constituting the deltas and the valley-terraces of existing 
rivers. What is this condition ? It is one of disintegra- 
tion, confusion, intermixture. Examine a handful of the 
gravel which comes in daily from Roxbury to be dumped 
into the Back Bay, and say what are its constituent ele- 
ments ? and where they originated ? Pebbles of quartz, 
of porphyry, of micaslate, of gneiss, of syenite, white, 
black, red, green, and blue are there ; tell me their several 
ages, their ancient starting-points, the course of the ice- 

7 



98 ON THE UNITY [lECT. 

berg, the glacier^ or the current which brought them to 
the quarry. The data exist. Guyot has traced the ancient 
moraines of Switzerland back to the existing glaciers, and 
thus to their mother peaks among the Alps. Nature 
writes out in full all her family trees. With care you can 
interpret them to a certainty. A labourer collecting 
cobble-stones at the falls of the Delaware near Trenton 
for the pavements of Philadelphia may wonder how this or 
that one can happen to differ so widely from those about it. 
Yanuxem, or Conrad, or James Hall would tell him by 
certain marks upon it that it was a piece of coral ; that it 
grew originally in what is now the valley of the Mohawk ; 
that ice and rain had carried it down the whole course of 
the river Delaware from Cooperstown to tide ; and that 
the pebbles, among which it lies are red sand- stones of a 
later age from Newtown, quartzites of an older age from 
Easton, blue slates from the Water Gap, iron-stones from 
Milford, and copper- slates from Port Deposit. . 

Modern cities are the gravel-banks of humanity. Dis- 
integrated vsbces of mankind are drifted into them. Of the 
600,000 inhabitants of Philadelphia, a rude one-tenth have 
been brought to it on those pitiless ice-bergs, the slave- 
ships, from the southern continent of the old world and 
represent all the principal subdivisions of the blach races. 
A second tenth has been supplied by Suabia, Switzerland, 
Bohemia, Moravia, Austria, Hungary, and other native 
lands of the Sclavonic race. A third tenth has come from 
Northern Germany and Scandinavia, and represents the 
Teutonic race, in its two branches. A fourth and fifth are 
Gelts, from Ireland and Wales, the west of Scotland and 
the north and west of France, mixed in with Celt Iberians 
of Spain and Italy. The rest are lowland Scotch and 
English, a mongrel people made up of Celtic Britons, and 
Teutonic Franks and Saxons, Scandinavian Normans with 
Slavic, Finnish, Tartar and Shemitic streaks of blood. 
The Shemitic race is represented by thousands of Jews. 
And on the wharves are seen Cooleys from India and 
China, Malays from Singapore, and Canakas from Hawaii. 

Two opposing laws work mightily and incessantly over 
the ethnology of such a place. One is the law of mixture, 
tending to obliterate all distinctions of race and to produce 
jiew types ; the other is the law of segregation, tending to 



T.] 01? MANKIND. 99* 

draw the individuals of eacli stock together and to repro- 
duce those original distinctions. 

Under the first law, and by the intermarriage of the 
black race with the whites, we have mulattoes of every 
grade of colour, stature, and facial angle. Whether an 
improvement be the consequence men are not yet agreed. 
The circumstances have not yet been favourable for settling 
that question, nor will be until black and white can mix 
on terms of reasonable equality, each bringing to the 
other its own peculiar characteristics in full and free de- 
velopment. With regard to the races not so widely separ- 
ated by nature or by circumstances improvement by in- 
termixture is' an established truth. In middle Pennsylvania 
and Virginia for example, wherever intermarriage has 
taken place between North- Irish presbyterian Saxons and 
the families of the old Swope and Hessian emigrants, a 
magnificent mongrel breed of people fills the valleys of the' 
Susquehanna, Juniata, and Potomac, with frames of steel 
and brains of flame, the stuff of which heroes, poets and 
philosophers are made. No one can avoid observing the 
rapid improvement of the Celtic race in the United States 
wherever it is free to cross itself with Teutonic blood. 
Let all due weight be given to the other elements of pro- 
gress, superior food, superior labour, superior education, 
still we cannot fail to recognize the crossing of the breeds 
as the chief hope of the nation. Civilization is the flower 
of migration. Every great history has sprung from some 
barbaric invasion. A new humanity follows every deluge. 
Arts and learnings are the electric lights about the wire- 
points where two races approximate. One kind of blood 
is metal to the acid of another : mix them in generous 
proportions and you have Harems calorimotor on a cosmical 
scale; you can burn up with it the past or electrotype 
with it the future. When the effervescence ceases the 
Creator walks away ; the apparatus is useless until it is 
charged anew. 

By the law of segregation, on the other hand, the Ger- 
mans of Philadelphia have drawn off into the north- 
eastern quarter of the city, and made a Prankfort-on-the- 
Maine of it. The blacks have appropriated the southern 
wards and made a Timbuctoo of them. The Irish cluster 
about their churches, the Jews about their synagogues,. 



100 ON THE UNITY [lECT, 

without need of legislative enactments. The west end of 
one of the finest streets in Cincinnati is formed by rows of 
palaceS;, built since the middle of the war, and all inhabited 
by Jews. The principal Quaker families of Philadelphia 
still reside in Arch-street — a beautiful meeting-house a 
mile long and so monotonous that you might turn it end 
for end, or upside down, and nobody should perceive the 
difference. 

But when groups of tourmaline or spinel segregate in 
the old or metamorphic rocks they are signs of age or 
long stagnation. A city with established quarters of dis- 
tinct nationalities cannot improve at tlje same rate with a 
city like Chicago or St Louis where confusion of races 
pervades the place. Arch-street was long an iron bar 
between its legs to the city of William Penn. The pro- 
hibitory tarifi" which the south so long laid against the im- 
portation of Yankee blood was that which made Charles 
Sumner's speech so dreadfully true. The Indian tribes of 
North America fossilized themselves by isolation ; and now 
they perish because they cannot marry into a stronger 
family. In the earlier ages of mankind this law of segre- 
gation ruled despotically. And why ? Because it is the 
law which guards the individual life, without regard to the 
improvement of the race. That other law of disintegra- 
tion and intermixture patronizes the improvement of the 
race and disregards the life of the individual. What do 
the forces of civilization care for the happiness or misery 
of the individual coal-miner that furnishes fuel for its 
stea,m-enginej or the sailor who brings it over the sea, or 
the engine-driver who is smashed on the experimental trip, 
or the factory gii"l, or the telescopic-lens grinder, or the 
Lord Premier who commits suicide, or the First Consul 
who eats his broken heart at St Helena ? Nothing. 
Christianity, indeed, sympathizes with each and at the 
same time with all, and thus observes both laws, and em- 
ploys them both for the happiness of the individual and 
for the progress of the race. But Christianity is a recent 
device of the Deity. Our theme antedates it a million 
years, if Desnoyer's tertiary bones were really scratched 
and split by the hands of men. 

Questions to-night will come up such as these : Of what 
race of men are Desnoyer's tertiary human bones the 



v.] OF MANKIND. 101 

vestiges ? In what street of Paris or Boston will you tind 
tlieir present representatives ? Was it that primeval race 
which afterwards fashioned the flint implements buried in 
the post-tertiary diluvium of Abbeville ; and those found 
in the bone-caverns of Belgium? Was it the i-ace whose 
skeletons lie mouldeinng in the tumuli of the Stone period 
here or there ? Is it one of the great existing races of 
the present day ? How many existing races really are 
there ? How can we distinguish them apart now that they 
are so intermixed ? And if we can distinguish them apart, 
can we also arrange them in any hierarchy or natural order 
of mutual excellence ? Are any of them essentially and 
incurably bestial ? Can there be established any rational 
connection between the lowest races of mankind existing 
now and the oldest skulls and skeletons ? Can we in any 
way make these an intermediate link between the Christian 
gentleman and the abominable chimpanzee ? 

These questions have been discussed by many writers, 
and been'taken up in almost every order. Each writer has 
given greater prominence to one or other of them accord- 
ing to the S]3ecial nature of his studies. Perhaps the clear- 
est statement of them has been made by Carl Vogt, Pro- 
fessor of Comparati\^e Anatomy in the Academy at Geneva, 
in a series of lectures delivered at Neuenburg in one of the 
valleys of the Swiss Jura and published in two volumes at 
Giessen, in 1864. His collection of facts down to the 
most recent discoveries of last year is comprehensive. 
His searching criticism of the various and opposite 
opinions held still by men of science illustrate the whole 
subject. His reputation as an anatomist is of the highest 
rank. His independence is as admirable as his scientific 
method is clear and straiglitforward. Whether his classi- 
fication of the human races will fare better than those of 
his predecessors or not, the strong gi'ound of his general 
conclusions^ I think, cannot be shaken. They are not in 
fact Ms conclusions ; they are the provisional sentiments 
of a, large number of the leaders of science for the 
moment produced by the sum total of our information up 
to date, and subject of course to constitutional amendment 
according to law. As such I ofier them for your con- 
sideration this evening. 

I stated in general terms in my last lecture that no dif- 



102 ON THE UNITY [lECT. 

ference could be made out between man and tbe monkey 
as to the ground-plan of tbeir forms. Their bands are 
planned like human hands, their feet like human feet, their 
brains like human brains, their jaws and teeth like human 
jaws and teeth, and so of all other parts of their organiza- 
tion. 

The same, of course, can be asserted respecting the dif- 
ferent races of men ; they are all built upon one plan. If 
this makes them all of one race, then it becomes also 
necessary to assert that men and monkeys are of one race 
because they are built upon a common plan. 

The differences which do exist, both between men and 
monkeys and between one race of men and another, as 
well as between one race of monkeys and another, are 
differences in the development of this ground-'plan common 
to all. Take the idea of the skull for an instance : it may 
be more ape-like or more man-like ; it may be brachy- 
cephalic, i. e. short for its width, or dolichocephalic, i. e. 
long for its width ; it may hare a low, retreating fore- 
head, or a high, erect forehead ; it may show a perfectly 
symmetrical curve when seen sidewise or endwise, or it 
may be lumpy and knobby like a laurel root ; it may be 
high and pointed ; or immensely developed behind the 
ears ; or all brought forwards over the eyes ; or bulging 
over the ears sideways ; it may be marked by ridges and 
crests, fore and aft and from side to side. All these differ- 
ences you are accustomed to meet in your daily walks ; and 
these same kinds of differences you would see if you ex- 
tended your walks to the forests of the tropics. The sub- 
ject is one of degrees, or rather one of details. Just as, 
to nse one of Yogt^s illustrations, when an architect is 
showing his scholars the essential unity of plan which re- 
sides in all Gothic domes he explains the various ways in 
which the idea of this plan is unfolded in the different 
cathedrals of Europe. 

And so of all other parts of the human organism as of 
all other members of the Gothic edifice. We cannot take 
one part as our criterion ; we must take the whole animal, 
the whole man. The shape of the skull is very important, 
because very changeable, and because skulls are attainable 
when no other vestige of man remains to be examined. 
But the shape of the limbs, the colour of the skin and 



v.] OF MANKIND. 103 

ejes, the growth of the hair — in a word, the entire aspect 
of the person must, in the end, decide for us his afl&nities, 
and enable us to fix those limits of variation which con- 
stitute a race. Lnj other method of classification would 
be empirical and not natural. 

To show you how careful we must be to take every part 
of the phenomenon into consideration, and to give you an 
additional illustration of the delicacy and shrewdness of 
modern methods of investigation, I will adduce a couple of 
facts connected with the measurement of human skulls. 
It does not necessarily follow that small skulls contain 
feeble brains, nor that small brains in one century may not 
become larger in another century. 

The action of the brain seems dependent upon its folded 
surface. Wagner has shown by the following table that 
women^s brains weigh less than men's, but that their sur- 
faces when unfolded and spread out equal or exceed those 
of men : — 



Number. "^^'S^^ "^ 

gramms. 

1. (Dirichlet) 1520 

2. (Fuchs) 1499 

3. (Gauss) 1492 


Convex surface in 

16nmm of great squares. 

2553 

2489 

2419 


4. (Hermann) 1358 


2406 


6. Man 1340 


2451 


6. „ 1330 


2309 


7. „ 1273 


2117 


8. Woman 1254 


2498 


9. (Hausmann) 1226 
10. Woman 1223 


3065 

2272 


11 „ 1185 


2300 


12. Mikrocephalus (idiot) 300 896 
Man, 1499 gramms weight and 2489 of surface. 



Woman, 1254 „ „ 2498 of surface. 

It is possible thus to explain the small head and womanly 
intellectuality of the Hindu race.* 

Another such fact is one that Brocaf discovered by his 
measurement of skulls obtained from two Parisian grave- 
yards as old or older than the time of Philip Augustus, i. e. 
of the twelfth century. It goes to show that the average 

• Vogt, vol. i. p. 137. t Ibid- PP- 106, 108. 



104 . ON THE UNITY [lBCT. 

size of the skull of tlie same race may increase in the 
course of time. 115 of these skulls from one graveyard 
gave the mean size of 1461.53 cubic centimetres; 117 
skulls from another graveyard gave 1409.31 cubic centi- 
metres; while that of 125 skulls of paupers^ buried in a 
modern Parisian cemetery (1788 — 1824) in spite of the 
debasing influences of poverty measured 1484.23. 

Morlot in comparing the shape and size of a multitude 
of ancient Helvetian skulls which he examined, with the 
skulls of their descendants the Genevese of the present 
day, comes to the same conclusion and ascribes the im- 
provement to the influence of Christianity. 

Great discussion has been had over this matter of change 
in the form of the human skull, on the one side under the 
influence of favourable circumstances, and of unfavourable 
circumstances on the other. The factitious reputation 
which the English Pritchard acquired came from his 
assiduous collection and collation of supposed examples of 
the degeneracy of people through misfortune, and of the 
improvement of other people through good fortune. His 
instances of the Turks, of the Jews, of the Irish are well 
known. He thought that facts warranted him in assert- 
ing that the bow-legged and savage-featured horsemen of 
Independent Tartary had become in two or three centuries 
the straight-legged handsome aristoci"ats of Constanti- 
nople. That the white Jews of Palestine had become under 
an Indian sky the black Jews of Madras. That the tall, 
stout, clever Irish of Meath, when driven by the English 
from their farms to huddle half-starved in mud-huts in the 
south-west corner of the Green Isle, became in a few 
generations the ngly, low-browed, meagre-limbed, pot- 
bellied, brutal creatures whom the famine drove in crowds 
to this country and whose well-fed children now constitute 
a class of our society not at all inferior to any other as far 
as physical and mental development is concerned. 

This story of the Irish has been again taken up by one 
of the most exact ethnologists of our own day, M. Quatre- 
fages of Paris. I will give it in his own words : — 

' When the British suppressed the Irish rebellions of 
1649 and 1689, great crowds of native Irish were driven 
out from Armagh and the south of county Down, in one di- 
rection, into the mountains between Flews and the sea, 



v.] OP MANKIND. 105 

and in tlie otlier, into Leitrim, Sligo, and Mayo. From 
that time on, these people suffered tlie evil influence of 
hunger and ignorance, those two great spoilers of man- 
kind. Their descendants may be easily distinguished at 
the present day from their relatives left in Meath in good 
estate. They are marked by open, protruding mouths, 
projecting teeth, and fletschendern gums, high cheek- 
bones, suppressed noses, and barbarous foreheads. In 
Sligo and northern Mayo, two centuries of wretchedness 
have stamped themselves upon the whole bodily constitu- 
tion, within and without, furnishing us with an example of 
human degeneration through known causes, so instructive 
for the future, as to compensate for the misery of the past. 
Their mean height is about 5 ft 2 inches ; they are thick- 
bellied, crook-legged, like mis-begotten children ; clad in 
rags they go about, the ghosts of a once full-sized, well- 
bodied, and courageous people. In other quarters of the 
island where this same Irish race has suffered no such 
lamentable miseries, it furnishes the fairest examples of 
human strength and beauty, not only physical but intel- 
lectual also. Yet this account, which makes one^s hair 
bristle with horror, is sufficient to show how easily it can 
be lowered to a level with, and be made to show all the 
characteristics of, the lowest negro races, the most aban- 
doned Australian tribes.'' 

I have selected from a great many others and given you 
in full this description of a case, which has made perhaps 
the profoundest impression upon the imagination of eth- 
nologists, because it will not only make the question before 
us plain but will show how differently different investi- 
gators conclude their inferences from the same facts. 

Pritchard, and his numerous old-school followers, see in 
this history only a fine example of man's susceptibility to 
change, and they prove by it and other like examples that 
satiety and hunger, heat and cold, field-life and forest-life, 
mountain-air and sea-air have been ample means for 
changing the descendants of the first pair, Adam and Eve, 
or of the second pair, Noah and Anna, into all the black, 
white, yellow, and red descriptions of mankind which now 
inhabit the globe. But in order to maintain this theory 
they are obliged to ignore or explain away a multitude 
of adverse fact? going to show that this capacity of man 



106 ON THE UNITY [lBCT. 

for change is so limited that any race subjected to ad- 
versity beyond a certain point not only degenerates but 
perishes entirely^ like any other kind of animal. 

This opposite view has been taken up with the same ex- 
cessive advocacy and want of logical balance by Dr Knox 
and his school^ who go to the extent of maintaining that 
no migration is possible ; that the number of original 
human races is very great ; that each of them was created 
to occupy a certain definite area and can occiipy no other ; 
that any translation of it from that area to another is 
necessarily fatal ; and that the degeneration of the Irish 
vagabonds from Meath was as certain a premonition of 
extinction as the degeneration of the European emigrants 
to these United States must end in the extinction of our 
race, unless it be enabled to drag out a lingering existence 
here by large and constant accessions of fresh hfe from 
Europe. 

Such speculations are not scientific. We call Pritchard 
an old fogy ; we call Knox a crazy fellow. We must not 
only have alleged facts, we must have actual facts, sifted, 
analyzed, weighed, and measured, before we can begin to 
see our way through such a world of mystery as is this 
question of races. This sifting of facts is what character- 
izes the ethnology of the last few years. 

You will ask, what opinion does Quatrefages entertain 
of the case which he cites so eloquently, and as if he fully 
coincided with Pritchard^ s cherished sentiments ? Be not 
surprised when I tell you that he doubts the facts them- 
selves. He quietly asks if it be not possible that the two 
classes of Irish peasantry thus contrasted, the one de- 
graded to a level with Australians, the other allied to the 
most favoured Ca,ucasians, ever really had anything to do 
with each other. *" 'No/ says he, ' the Irishman of Meath 
alone represents the old stock, he has remained at home, 
he has remained- unaltered. The Irishman of Flews, on 
the contrary, placed in other circumstances, has changed 
himself and formed a new race out of the old one, in har- 
mony with its unhappy surroundings. There are therefore 
now two races in these neighbouring counties.'' 

And what has Vogt, again, to say to this ? Yogt smiles 
at Quatrefages^ ingenious subterfuge. Supposing the 
details of the Irish story to be true, how does it affect the 



v.] OP MANKIND. 107 

question of the radical distinction between the skull of a 
white Celt and the skull of an Australian negro ? Who 
has examined the skulls of these degraded Irishmen of 
Flews, and compared them in the light of the latest science 
with the skulls of the Irishmen of Meath their alleged 
cousins on the one side to make out the differences, and 
with the skulls of Australians on the other side to make 
out the resemblance ? Has Pritchard ? Has Quatrefages ? 
Has Broca ? Has Morton or Bachman ? Has Scherzer and 
Schwarz ? Has Busk, or Camper, or Welcker, or Von 
Baei', or Virchow, or Luc^, or Gratiolet, or Huschke, or 
Aiken Meigs, or anybody ? Nobody ! Then what does our 
actual knowledge about it amount to after all ? To nothing. 
There being no competent witnesses the case is ruled out 
of court. 

We might spend much time in showing how all the old 
and well-established points of controversy are broken off 
in pretty much the same manner by want of proper pre- 
liminary criticism. In the Turkish pase, for instance : 
who knows how much of the old Turkoman element still 
lingers at Constantinople ? And where did the Turks 
obtain mothers for their children but from the population 
of the empire which they spent more than one lifetime in 
overthrowing ; to say nothing about the mountain beauties 
of the Caucasus. 

In the case of the black Jews of India : who does not 
know that the black Jews of Abyssinia boast that they are 
the descendants, not of the patriarchs, but of the Queen 
of Sheba ? Their Judaism is therefore a superstition over- 
laid upon their blood, and cannot be adduced in proof 
that their Israelitish blood has ever changed even by the 
thousandth part of an atom of iron. 

Take the case of the negroes in America, of which Lyell, 
and Reiset, and Keclus have written so glibly; and who 
knows anything with certainty about it ? A land indeed 
of darkness and of the valley of death. We must wait 
until the negroes take up the question themselves ; until 
a truth-telling census gives us facts; until a thorough 
and searching discrimination has been exercised. Men 
pretend to say that the negro race has been marvellously 
modified by mere change of habitat, by new climates, soils 
and foods ; or as they are sometimes inclined to fancy, by~ 



108 ON THE UNITY [lECT. 

mysterious or, at least, unknown agencies, Reclus asserts 
his positive knowledge of the fact that as a race the 
negroes have advanced one-fourth way towards the form 
and appearance of the whites. Reiset opines that the 
pure-blooded Africans of the Antilles retain their native 
character, only iveaJcened. Some writers confidently insist 
that the negro skin is not so black, his nose not so small, 
his forehead higher, his lips thinner than they used to be. 
Even if it were possible to discover and prove all this to 
be true what would it signify when we consider the con- 
sistent and universal profligacy of the whites who have 
lived among them and have been their absolute masters ; 
when we consider the immense variety of thick and thin 
lipped, high and low browed, large and small nosed tribes 
in Africa from which the dreadful sum of all that evil was 
made up ; and lastly, when we consider the operation of 
the internal slave trade, that Virginian pudding-stick 
stirred by the hand of Mammon for ever mixing up these 
various original and derived ingredients together, to pro- 
duce a chaos of results before which any man, were he 
not a Charleston clergyman or a foreign tourist, would 
stand awe- struck and silent. 

Lastly, take our own Yankee case. Listen, if you can 
without indulging in a hearty laugh, to the following de- 
scription by Pruner Bey of the results of European emi- 
gration to America. '' Already, after the second genera- 
tion,^ says this shrewd observer, ' the Yankee shows the' 
features of the Indian type. Later still, his lymphatic 
system becomes reduced to the minimum of its normal de- 
velopment. The skin grows dry as leather ; the warmth 
of the complexion and the ruddiness of the cheeks are 
lost — exchanged, in the man, for a clayey tint,- in the 
woman, for a sickly paleness. The head grows smaller, 
round or even pointed, and covers itself with straight, 
dark hair; the neck elongates, and one can see a great 
development of muscle in the cheek and jaw. The temples 
deepen; the cheek-bones grow massive; the eyes sink 
into deep orbits and lie close together. The iris is dark ; 
the glance grows piercing and wild. The long bones be- 
come still longer, especially those of the upper limbs, so 
that gloves of a peculiar shape, with very long fingers, 
are manufactured in France and England for the American 



v.] OF MANKIND. 109 

market. The inner lioles of these bones become narrow ; 
the nails grow Hght, long, and pointed; the woman^s jjel- 
vis approximates in shape to that of the man.'' ' And 
thus/ adds Quatrefages, ' the Anglo-Saxon type in America 
has become changed and a new white race has sprung out 
of the old English race to which we may give the name of 
Yankee race.-' 

Now all this to one accustomed to see the beautiful 
women of New England and the fine-looking men of the 
middle States is sheer nonsense. Every intelligent citizen 
of the United States has travelled enough to know that 
the picture which Pruner Bey has given us represents no 
such general reality as to be of the least ethnological im- 
portance. It is a picture of individual heads, faces, and 
forms which contrast strongly with other and widely dif- 
ferent heads, faces, and forms among whom they livOj and 
moreover, such as may be seen all over Europe. There is 
not even a well-marked class of society in the United 
States to answer the description. And as for a Yankee 
race, no such thing exists in the sense assigned to the 
word by these authors. Even in New England there are 
recognized nearly half a dozen varieties of man. I could 
take you to a valley in Pennsylvania, fifty miles long by 
five miles wide, crossed by an invisible ethnologioal line, 
north-east of which the inhabitants are stout, strong- 
headed, handsome descendants of north Irish Presby- 
terians ; while south-west from it the inhabitants are 
Awmish descendants of Swiss mountaineers, equally good- 
looking in their way. Behind this valley, and on the 
summit of the Alleghany mountains 2000 feet above the 
sea. Count Galitzin established his colony of Polish 
Catholics, and their monastery is still in use, and so is 
their cathedral. Twenty miles farther north, in the heart 
of the forest, is the settlement of a wealthy Englishman. 
Thirty miles farther north, still deeper in the forest and 
on still higher ground, spread out the fields of St Mary's, 
tilled by over ten thousand French Catholics. Forty miles 
north-east of this and in the centre of the great forests of 
the Sinnemahoning Ole Bull founded his unhappy colony 
of Swedes. Forty miles to the north of this again would 
bring us to the settlements of the Connecticut men up on 
the head waters of the Alleghany river ; and an equal dis- 



110 ON THE UNITY [lECT. 

tance to the south would return us among the descendants 
•of the race which inhabited the Black Forest and the 
Vosges. 

Go from State to State and such facts will face you 
•everywhere. You may draw two lines across the State of 
Ohio so as to cut it into three regions^ each with a separate 
ethnological development^ distinct in appearance^ in their 
manners and customs^ in peculiarities of language and in 
their religious habits. 

But what is that Anglo-Saxon race concerning which 
we have heard so much and to which no one has yet suc- 
ceeded in giving a form ? Vogt well says that it has no 
existence ; Max Miiller confirms the statement_, if it 
needed confirmation. It is a chaos of races^ this so-called 
Anglo-Saxon race. And so is the population of the United 
States a chaos of races ; an ethnological moraine, or gravel 
terrace^ or delta deposit^ to recur to the illustration already 
used. We cannot yet learn from it anything respecting 
those great laws of human variation which^ sooner or later, 
will be discovered. 

What the other sciences wait for is this ; that ethnology 
should adopt some correct method of investigation. It 
has been well said that offctimes a proper method of in- 
vestigating is a grander and more useful discovery than 
any which the investigation itself may yield. For the 
discovery of a right method is so much absolute abstract 
science accomplished^ involving as it does the knowledge 
of principal truths in their prime relations ; whilst the dis- 
coveries which result from an investigation are commonly 
themselves mere isolated facts ; and facts are good for no- 
thing until they are synthetically converted into laws. 

Now the difficulty of devising a proper method for ethno- 
logical research arises from the fact that there are two oppo- 
site tendencies in nature — the one towards differentiation or 
individualization^ the other towards integration or gener- 
alization. Nature is for ever at war with herself, pulling 
down with one hand while building up with the other. 
♦She obeys blindly the law of Christ not to let her left 
hand know what her right hand doeth. She keeps races 
separate ; she mixes them together. She gives to man an 
intense love of home, a powerful associative principle, the 
rage of love, the fire of friendship, the pride of country. 



v.] OF MANKIND. Ill 

the bigotry of worship, the jealous guardianship of property 
— all this to develope the family and preserve the local 
type. On the other hand, she inspires the soul with a 
thirst for change, with curiosity concerning the distant and 
the new, with the love of conquests, with the hopes of 
betterment — all these to develope the powers of the indi- 
vidual man, and at the same time to spread out population 
as widely as possible. 

These are at home with the natural law that offspring- 
should bear the characteristic features of both father and 
mother. And if this were the only law of inheritance it 
would be easy enough to make out the exact forms and 
limits of each race, for its individuals would be alike. 
But there is another law in force, by which each child 
inherits only a limited selection of the characteristic 
features of father and mother ; and one child more of one 
and another child more of another. One child takes on 
the physical form of the father with the mental character of 
the mother ; another child reverses the order and resem- 
bles the father in mind and the mother in body. This 
latter law, therefore, modifies and confuses the former, 
establishing individual variety in the midst of stirpal uni- 
formity. But in doing so it also provides a potent means 
for bringing into the history of a family a more or less 
complete divergence from the original type ; in fact, the 
production of a new race out of an old one. Were this 
the only law ethnology would be an impossible science. 
Utter confusion would attend the history of human life. 

But a third law has been moreover discovered. It is 
called in the natural history of the lower creatures the 
law of alternate generation, by which the jelly-fish begets 
a star-fish and the star-fish in turn begets a jelly-fish. 
This law is strangely powerful over human character. 
I think that as a rule a child is more likely to resemble 
its grandparents than its parents. By this law hereditary 
diseases like scrofula and insanity and mental and bodily 
peculiarities of every kind appear, lie hid, and re-appear 
in a series of alternate generations. This is in fact that 
conservative force in nature which strives perpetually 
against abnormal variation, and insists upon a return to 
the old idea. This is the-mysterious under-current by 
which Mongol heads and faces are forced to the surface of 



112 ON THE UNITY [lECT. 

some Teutonic or Celtic stream. I have seen profiles in Phi- 
ladelphia which might have been copied from the alabas- 
ter tablets of Khorsabad — pure Assyrian faces, no doubt 
the product of Hebrew blood descended through forty 
centuries from Ur of the Chaldees. 

The power of this preserving force of type, whatever 
may be its nature, stamps the great areas of the earth^s 
surface with those unmistakable generalizations to which 
no amount or intensity of individual variation can make us 
blind. It is the genius of the race. On the oldest monu- 
ments of the Pharaohs the pictures of different kinds of 
dog are recognized by any child as the pictures of the dogs 
with which he plays to-day. The pictures of the Negro, 
the Jew, the Egyptian, the Scythian are perfect likenesses 
of the Nubians, Fellahs, Jews, and Turks of to-day. There 
you may see, portrayed in colours 6000 years old, the same 
slave-traders driving down the same slave cofifles as in the 
same valley of the Nile to-day. If all the races of mankind 
are variants by the law of variation from the form of Noah 
or of Adam, then how infinitely remote must have been the 
time when Noah or Adam lived. On the other hand, if 
the law of constancy in form has kept the races apart from 
the beginning, how numerous must be the list of actual 
human races ; how closely must they have been confined 
to their respective centres of creation ; and how difficult 
it becomes for ethnology to devise any efiicient and reliable 
method of research for explaining the mixture of races in 
the more civilized portions of the earth ! 

Let me fix your attention for a moment on this curious 
map of Prance, published in the memoirs of the Royal 
Asiatic Society many years ago. It exhibits the depart- 
ments of the French empire, each overspread with a dif- 
ferent shade of colour and marked with a certain cypher. 
This map afibrds a brilliant example of ethnological method. 
You are perhaps aware that the French, as a people, are 
mulattoes; but a general observation like that advances us 
scarcely a step in true science, although it may be quite 
sufiicient to stifle the clamour which slaveholders have 
raised against the possibility of ' miscegenation.-' It is in 
the highest degree desirable to know in what sense and to 
what extent the French people are mulattoes ; in what pro- 
vinces and departments they are most dark, and in what 



v.] OF MANKIND. 113 

other provinces and departments they are most white. 
If we could discover by some accui-ate method — say by 
that of percentages — some law of increase of the dark 
element in French blood in some one direction and of the 
white element in some othei^, we should come into posses- 
sion of means for tracing the mixture to the former seats 
of a dark race in the first direction or on that side of 
France ; and of a white race whose seat was in the other 
direction on the opposite side of France. Now that is pre- 
cisely what this map enables us to do. You observe how 
the percentage-shades form belts running across .the king- 
dom from N.W. to S.E.^ and how the darker belts are 
those upon the S.W. or Spanish side^ while the lighter 
belts are on the N.E. or towards Germany. Until this 
map was constructed it was supposed that the abori- 
ginal population of France was to be sought for in the 
central region of the Cantal and the mountains of Auvergne. 
But you see how steadily and equally the aboriginal dark 
or ' brown ' race of France as it is called has been pressed 
down from the Rhine and the Channel towards the Bay 
of Biscay and the Pyrenees. You see how the increase of 
its mixture with the fair German race has been in propor- 
tion to the distance from the Rhine. As for the white 
race it of course belonged to central Europe^ and was 
either Sclavic or Teutonic^ perhaps both, certainly in part 
Teutonic. But the dark race with which it mixed — what 
shall we think of it ? Where shall we find it pure ? The 
map suggests the only answer to these questions. The 
colour deepens to a maximum where the Pyrenean 
mountains meet the sea. These mountains are the home of 
three divisions of one race, speaking three dialects of one 
language called the Basque; a language possessing no 
well-proven affinities with any European tongue ; but sug- 
gesting some resemblances with the language of the Finns, 
a people perhaps related to the same circumpolar race to 
which the Esquimaux belong. These Basques are sturdy 
mountaineers and have never been driven from their homes ; 
but their mountains stood with their feet in the sea, and 
the Basques became great fishermen ; the Cabots found 
the banks of Newfoundland covered with their boats, and 
it is said that they sold cod by name in the markets of 
Hamburg and Havre before Columbus made his first voy- 

8 



114 ON THE UNITY [lECT. 

age. The native word is not 'Basque^ but '^ Escamara;' 
almost identical witli Esquimaux. The west end of Brittany 
is peopled by a fragment of this same race preserved in the 
same manner among rocks and in the surf, but who have 
exchanged their language for a Celtic dialect. St Malo was 
celebrated in the middle ages for its breed of sailors who 
shared with the southern Basques in the fisheries of La- 
brador. Another and exceedingly small fragment of this 
mysterious and most ancient brown race exists in Ireland 
in the shape of a group of hamlets on the northern shore 
of Galway bay ; the people intermarry among themselves 
and have little in common with the Celtic population of the 
country. Now if we track the brown race southward we 
find it as a modifying element in all the Spanish peninsula, 
especially among the Sierras and in secluded Portugal. 
Whatever was its mixture with the Celtic blood of France 
it formed with Celtic blood the entire humanity of Spain 
and hence the name which the Romans gave it, Celt Iberia. 
If we take this latter name Iberia and compare it with 
a multitude of others — I will not weary you with the de- 
tails — ^we arrive at the conclusion that in the brown race of 
western Europe we have a division of the great aboriginal 
Berber race of northern Africa ; a conclusion which it 
would have been impossible for the best ethnologist to 
have advanced with any confidence until some such method 
of investigation had been adopted as this map illustrates.* 
Not by suppositions and conjectures but only by a 
rigorous self-denial of the imagination and by restricting 
it to its proper function, the invention of true methods of 
investigation, can the questions be answered which eth- 

* But after such investigations have been made, these direct observa- 
tions are of value. For example, in 1862, MM. Martins, Desor, and Eschar 
da la Linth studied the Berbers in their native haunts. ' The Sufites,' 
writes Desor, ' are genuine Berbers, and, as such, white with black hair, 
like the southern Europeans ; and were it not for their burnus Martins 
might have reoognized them for a troop of scholars from some village 
of Provence or Languedoc. But one thing drew our attention, the very 
extended form of the head ; they are true longheads (dolicho-cephaloi), as 
one sees chiefly only so well pronounced from the ancient graves ; the 
face is angulai and thin, the teeth vertical and beautifully white like those 
of all these peoples. The body is lank, and capable of marvellous endur- 
ance.' (Letter to Liebig, p. 29.) I say nothing here of the superb train 
of argument coming out of the recent researches into the dolmen or Druid 
architecture of Europe and Africa. 



y. I OF MANKIND. 115 

nologistiS are askiug of each other respecting similar mix- 
tures of the white and black racer in other parts of the 
world ; in India and Burmah, for example^ where also the 
aboriginal element seems to have been black, and to have 
been mixed first with yellow Turanian blood from the north- 
east, and afterwards with white Arian bloo d from the north- 
west. Were this a course of lectures on Ethnology proper 
I would gladly take up these questions one by one. But 
I must occupy the few minutes I have left in sketching out 
the direction which the inquiry takes in bearing upon 
the connection of the present races with those of the Stone 
or Diluvial age and with the ape and monkey tribes. 

The most nobly organized races are the most migratory, 
because they have the faculties of self-protection in the 
highest state of efficiency. The white Shemite^the Arab 
merchant, traffics in person every year from Morocco to 
Singapore. He has imprinted his alphabet, his cipher, his 
unitarianism upon a belt of the earth^s surface extending 
from the Senegal and Gambia to Lake Baikal. He has 
ennobled by mixture with his own blood the Khoord, the 
Nubian, the Berber, and the Celt. How far back this be- 
ginning of his influence would go, if we could follow it, 
we cannot yet make out. But what is true of this sub- 
division of the great white race is true of the white race 
as an entire whole. It has mowed a broad historic swath 
along the temperate zone, subjugating, proselyting, ele- 
vating the darker and poorer races which had previous 
possession of the earth, the less mixed and fragmentary 
remains of which we find among the mountains or on pro- 
montories or in islands in the sea. 

North of the belt of this historic white race lies the 
nearly undisturbed population of the Arctic zone. To the 
south of it dwell enormous separated masses of black men. 
I omit all mention here of the red Indians of America so 
as not to complicate the subject.* 

* De Gobineau, in his ' Essai sur I'inegalit^ des Races Humaines,' 
Paris, 1853 (Phil. Lib.), devotes the 16th chapter of vol. i. to a descrip- 
tion of the characteristic features of the three type races ; but adds that 
at the earliest date we see them they were not pure, and that now thev 
have been mixed a hundred times. (See foot-note to Lecture p. 184.) 

The Melanian variety, he says, is at the bottom of the scale. The 
animal form of its pelvis fixes its destiny from the moment of conception. 



116 ON THE UNITY [LEtT. 

These races 'seem to be as different in species as wolvea 
and foxes differ from jackals and dogs. There is abso- 

(A.'Ei-iivichjeKd^espriL) It never leaves the limits of restricted intel- 
lectuality. But it is no brute, pure and simple, this negro with narrow, 
retreating forehead, carrying in the middle skull indications of certain 
grossly powerful energies. If its thinking faculties are middling, or re- 
duced to nothing, it possesses in desire, and therefore in its will, a terrible 
intensity. Many of its senses are developed with a vigour unknown to 
the two other races, especially the senses of taste and smell. But pre- 
cisely on the avidity of its sensations lies the stamp of its inferiority. 
All aliments are good for it ; nothing disgusts, nothing repulses it. 
(Pruner, i. 133.) Its lust is to eat, to eat excessively, with fury. No 
carrion is unworthy of its stomach. Its lust for gross odours accommo- 
dates itself to those most odious. To these chief traits is added an un- 
stable humour, a fixless variability of sentiment, annulling the distinction 
between vice and virtue for this race. The very rage with which it pursues 
the object which has put its sensitivity into vibration and inflamed its 
cupidity, is a gauge for the prompt appeasing of the one and the rapid 
forgetfulness of the other. Lastly, it values as little its own life as 
another's. It kills to kill ; and so this human machine, so easy to set in 
motion, is, in the presence of suffering, of a cowardice taking refuge iu 
death, or of a monstrous impassibility. 

The yellow race presents the antithesis of all this. The cranium pro- 
jects in front. Large, bony, salient often, developed well in height, ver- 
tical over a triangular face, wherein the nose and chin have none of those 
gross and rude projections of the negro. A tendency to obesity, though 
not a special trait, recurs more frequently in the yellow than in the other 
races. Little of physical vigour ; dispositions to apathy ; none of those 
strange moral excesses so common to the blacks. Feeble desires ; a will 
obstinate rather than extreme ; a taste perpetual but tranquil for material 
pleasures ; rarely gluttonous, but with more choice of aliments than the 
negro has. In all this, a tendency to mediocrity ; a comprehension quick 
enough, but neither elevated nor profound (quoting Carus, Weber Ung. 
etc., p. 60) ; a love of the useful ; respect for law ; conscious of the ad- 
vantages of a certain dose of liberty ; a practical race, in the narrow 
meiming of the word ; no dreamers nor lovers of theories ; inventing 
]iti le, but able to appreciate and adopt what serves its turn ; their desires 
limited to living as softly and commodiously as they can; a populace and 
small bourgeoisie, which every civilizer should choose for the basis of 
his society ; but not to give society nerve, beauty, or action. 

The white race has reflecting energy, or energetic intelligence; the 
sense of the useful in a larger, higher, more courageous, more ideal sense ; 
a perseverance in plain view of obstacles, able to find means for removing 
them out of the way ; with a greater physical power ; an extraordinary 
instinct for order, not only as the gauge of peace and rest, but as the in- 
dispensable means of conservation ; and yet a well pronounced taste for 
liberty, even in extreme ; a declared hostility to that formal sleepy 
Chinese organization, as well as to a haughty despotism, the only bridle 
for the blacks. The white men are distinguished by a singular love of 
life, prized more, because put to its proper uses by them. Their cruelty, 



▼.] OF MANKIND. 117 

lutely no reason for supposing them to be of one species 
except an absurd legend ascribed to an ancient Shemitic 
law-giver and preserved among a number of similar 
legends of various dates, inconsistent with themselves^ 
with each other and with the legends of surrounding 
nations. The legend of Adam and Eve makes all man- 
kind descend from Cain first and Seth afterwards, and yet 
says that Cain obtained his wife before Seth was born^ and 
in a country whither he had fled from Adam and Eve the 
only other human beings at that time on the earth. 
Then the descendants of Seth are made to live each one 
a thousand years, and when the earth was peopled, partly 
by a crossing of the human stock with angelic blood, the 
work of the Creator was entirely spoilt and had to be 
begun again ; the Antediluvians were all destroyed ; and 
Noah and his family became in their turn the sole progeni- 
tors of all our present races. As one of Adams's three 
sons was murdered by his brother, so one of Noah^s three 
sons was cursed by his father and his descendants handed 
over into bondage to the descendants of the other two. 
Of this most orthodox adventure a most diabolical handle 
has been made to justify the enslavement of the black 
race by the white. This hotchpotch of old Hebrew legends^ 
made sacred to our hearts by lectures from the pulpit and 
recitations at the mother's knee — this tissue of absurdity 
called the biblical history of the origin of mankind, is ab- 
solutely the sole and entire argument for not considering 
the human races as much distinct in kind and origin as are 
the llama and alpaca, or the vicuna and alpaca, or the 
springbok and the goat, or the hare and the rabbit, or the 
American bison and the European cow, or the wolf and 

when exercised, is conscious of its own excesses, a sentiment very proble- 
matical among the blacks. Yet they find reasons for leaving this occupied 
existence witliout a murmur — for honour, first, which under slightly va- 
rious names has occupied an enormous place in their ideas since the be- 
ginning of the race. Honour and its fruit, civilization, are not known to 
the yellow and black races. But this intellectual superiority is matched 
by an inferiority in their sensations. The white race is far more poorly 
endowed in sensual faculties than the other two. It is, therefore, less 
solicited and absorbed by corporal action, althongh its structure is 
remarkably more vigorous. (Martins says the European surpasses the 
black in the intensity of the nerve fluid. Reise in Brazilien, i. 259.) 

Here Gobineau has his tertiary and quaternary mixtures of these three 
grand secondary types. 



118 ON THE UNITY [lBCT. 

the dog, or the dog and the jackal, or the camel and the 
dromedary ; for all these acknowledged species not only- 
breed together but produce under certain conditions 
fertile offspring.* 

The Swiss naturalists thought that they had estabhshed 
four well-defined types of Helvetic skulls : the Sion type, 
rather long, and low in the crown ; the Hohberg type, with 
a pent-roof shape; the Dissentis type, bullet-headed, or 
square as it is usually called ; and the Belle-air type, of so 
mixed a character that ifc was soon discarded. The other 
three are still under discussion. The Sion type is identi- 
fied by the German naturalists as that of the Hiigel-graber 
or grave-mounds of the valley of the Ehine ; and the Hoh- 
berg type (once supposed to be Roman) with that of the 
. E-eihen-graber skulls. The Sion type is common in the 
caverns of Belgium and elsewhere. But in the caves of the 
south of France appears another type, a small round head 
like that of the Laplander's ; and this is the head associated 
with the rein- deer and other animals of that remote epoch. 
Pruner Bey therefore, in the congress of 1867 at Paris, 
insisted strenuously upon the necessity for recognizing 
this small round head as the earliest type of man known 
to us. But Professor Vogt objected that the round form 
is theoretically the most perfect of all forms, giving most 
weight and least superficial exposure ; but he especially 
recalled to view the fact never to be forgotten that the 
low Neanderthal skull (with others of a similar but not so 
excessively degraded a form) is equally ancient, and of a 
wholly opposite type. If the Hyperborean race followed 
(or led) the rein-deer to the south during the coming on 
of the glacial period there must have been some other race 
also already in the field, to meet and perhaps to disappear 
for a time before it, and then perhaps to reappear after the 
worlds of ice had melted and the Arctic zone had retreated 
within its polar circle. The encomiums lavished on the 
Engis skull are not only a little extravagant (for although 
it is finely shaped, it is not large), but its exact age also 
has never been satisfactorily determined. If however it 
be both very ancient and also Caucasian, then it establishes 
a third superior ancient race ; or, much more probably, 

* Vogt, vol. ii. 216. The only case of sterility, well authenticated, is 
that of the mule proper, the offspring of the horse and ass. 



T,] OP MANB3ND. 119 

it merely proclaims tlie eternal possibility of individual 
greatness even in tlie worst of times, 

I account it probable^ tben^ tbat the races of mankind 
have always been distinct ; and that they probably made 
their appearance on the planet successively ; pex-haps the 
black and meagre races first and the white races last. It 
would not be strange also to find their history running pa- 
rallel with that of the apes and monkeys. For it is not to 
be denied that in the three types of manlike ape, viz. the 
orang, the chimpanzee, and the gorilla, the three principal 
divisions of the family of apes have found their last and 
highest development. Whether we split up the orangs 
and the gorillas into separate species, or only recognize 
in them varieties like those which separate the afl&liated 
races of mankind, it is certain that each of the three man- 
like ape-forms presents its own characteristic manlike 
feature. The chimpanzee approaches man more closely in 
the form of the skull and in the character of its teeth. 
The orang approximates the human ideal especially in the 
construction of its brain. The gorilla resembles man rather 
in the make of his extremities. Neither one of the three 
can be said to stand absolutely nearer to man than the 
other two. All three strive to reach the human ideal, but 
on different sides of the common development. The orang, 
says Gratiolet, stands at the head of the family of gibbons 
and baboons on account of the size of its forehead, the 
relative smallness of its backhead and the development of 
its upper lobes : in other words, it has a better developed 
gibbon brain. The chimpanzee shows unmistakable anal- 
ogies of brain, skull, and face with the makaken, and 
especially with the magot, and stands in the same well- 
developed relation 'to the makakos and pavians that the 
orang does to the gibbons and baboons. The gorilla is a 
mandrill by force of similar analogies, by its lack of tail, 
its breadth of breast-bone, its singularity of gait, walking 
upon the back or outer side of its two last finger-joints. 
There has been, then, an unmistakable, threefold, and 
parallel development of the ape ideal, along three historic 
lines from three original family groups.* I do not myself 
Bee what forbids us from supposing that the process of 

* See Schroder van der Kolk and Vrolik's fivefold resemblance in Vogt, 
iL283. 



120 ON THE imiTY [lECT. 

development went ou to the production of those human 
forms of an acknowledged want of beaut j and spirituality, 
of an acknowledged ape-like appearance^ which we find 
populating the very regions of the chimpanzee^ gorilla, 
and orang, viz. the brutal black races of tropical Africa, 
and the negritoes of Anderman and New Holland. 

The objection I know is at hand that there are no in- 
termediate forms existing between those man-like apes 
and these ape-like men. But I think the force of this ob- 
jection is broken by several considerations. And fiirst, by 
the consideration that such intermediate forms need not 
for the sake of the argument exist in masses or tribes. 
Individuals scattered all over the world, through all the 
human races, with low foreheads, small brains, long arms, 
thin legs, projecting tusk-like teeth, suppressed noses, 
and other marks of arrested development ; to say nothing 
of millions of idiots and cretins produced by the same 
arrest in every generation of mankind, sustain the argu- 
ment. 

Then, secondly, we must consider that such intermediate 
forms may have existed in immense numbers and then 
disappeared, for all we know to the contrary. Nay, mul- 
titudes of them may exist in the fossil state still undis- 
covered. Vogt has well observed that 20 years ago 
not a single fossil ape had been made out. During these 
20 years nearly a dozen have been found. One year ago 
no intermediate form between the schlankaffen and maka- 
V"ri was known ; now wo have the whole skeleton of one.* 
Such intermediate types are continually turning up. 

And, thirdly, we must keep in mind most carefully that 
skulls have been found in caves which would have been 
undoubtedly assigned to apes had not other parts of the 
skeleton been found at the same time compelling the 
anatomist to assign them to some ancient form of humanity ; 
precisely as in the instance of the fossil ape discovered in 
Grreece, by its skull it would have been pronounced a pure 
baboon, had not its limbs been those belonging to a 
species of makaken. 

And, fourthly, when we compare the cave and lake and 
diluvial skulls as yet discovered with the skulls of the Aus- 
tralian natives (accepted as the most degraded or apelike 
* Vogt, ii. 279. 



v.] OF MANKIND. 121 

race now living on the earth), the resemblance in most 
cases (setting the Engis skull aside) is so extraordinary 
that we may be reasonably excused for suspecting that the 
early races of mankind were farther removed in the order 
of development from the noblest races now existing than 
the apes are removed from them. 

Let us praise God for our place in this procession of 
mysteries. If natural history should hereafter teach the 
truth of our descent from these inferior beings Christianity 
will always teach humility. Let us comfort our pride by 
remembering that everything has been good and perfect 
in its day and generation. 



LECTURE VI. 

ON THE EAELT SOCIAL LIFE OP MAN. 

The tree is known by its fruit. We have been con- 
sidering man as a being ; hencefortli we are to regard iiim 
as a worker : first, as a social being, a worker in brass and 
iron, a maker of boats and bridges, an inrentor of weapons, 
and a framer of laws ; tben, as an intellectual being, a 
poet or maker ^ar excellence, an artist, a philosopher, a 
priest. 

It is not as easy to distinguish races by degrees of facial 
angle as by grades of civilization. Perhaps we have a 
right to say : as only some races of animals are tamable, so 
only certain races of mankind are civilizable. As the car- 
nivora love blood, and the ruminants and pachyderms love 
foliage and grass, so do some races of mankind love tents 
and waggons, while others prefer cities and ships. But 
after all our efforts to include these social tendencies 
among the anatomical or physiological characteristics of 
mankind they recoil upon us as mere ha,rmonies of man 
with nature. So long as large areas of the eartVs surface 
consist of desert sands or grassy plains so long will there 
be nomade races to inhabit them; mountains will breed 
mountaineers ; deltas grow cities. The fishing races do not 
seek the seashore, they are produced by it. The forest 
gives birth to the hunter as it does to the deer and wild- 
boar after which he stalks. 

If this be so, and if forests have disappeared frum civil- 
ized lands by the agency of man, it follows, that when 
the earliest races of mankind appeared they appeared in 
the form of fishing and hunting savages, the form most in 
harmony with the physical condition of the greater part 
of the eartVs surface at that time. There were no doubt 
then as now natural paradises existing here and there 



ON THE EAKLY SOCIAL LIFE OF MAN. 123 

wterein some section of a single race would take on a 
quicker civilization than elsewhere. But lie must be blind 
who cannot detect the traces of that long^ hard^ desperate, 
bloody, cruel, demon-like conflict between the earliest 
men and all the adverse powers of the air and earth — a 
conflict in which all the advantage was on nature^ s side — 
but the victory on man^S;, because the genii of mind came 
to his relief. 

All civilization comes of work. The race that will not 
work cannot get civilized. Yet mere work is not a civil- 
izer. Leisure is indispensable. The French- Canadian 
works from four in the morning until six and seven at 
night, but his civilization is not high. Civilization is like 
navigation. It makes all the difference in the world 
whether there be a current with you or a current against 
you. In the tropics and at the poles the powers of nature 
are too many for man. If he barely sleep he will do well. 
So also in the early ages, even in the temperate zone, man- 
kind needed reinforcement. The black race which can- 
not advance under the equator any more than can the 
pigmy race around the pole, civilizes itself when it is 
transferred to the 40th parallel of latitude provided there 
be given to it a chance to work. The progress of the 
black race in the United States under all its disadvantages 
has been respectable. Give it the freedom of the plough, 
the anvil, and the loom, that is the right to enjoy the 
results of varied and honest labour, and you will give it 
the enjoyment of so much leisure afterwards as the high- 
est civilization needs. 

No race has ever yet consented to work for nothing 
cheerfully. All the sense of justice man has comes from 
resistance to that attempt. If the reconstruction of South- 
ern society is to be a success it can be so only on condi- 
tion that the white man share the soil, the shop, the 
schoolroom, and the forum with the black. That the 
black race is willing to buy civilization at its natural 
price, that is with work^ has been demonstrated. But to 
show you how delicate a test of justice work can be I will 
tell you a story which a friend of mine, an engineer upon 
a Southern railroad, told to me. 

A railroad was projected through the swamp-lands of 
Florida. Slaves were hired from the planters of Georgia 



124 ON THE EARLY [LECT. 

to do tlie work. A day's task for every man was measured 
with a ten-foot pole. The slaves rofee early and by work- 
ing diligently could complete their tale of work by two or 
three o'clock and have the rest of the day for their amuse- 
ment. They soon discovered this advantage and threw 
their whole soul into the business. Before noon nothing 
was to be seen but the flying dirt ; afternoon nothing but 
song and dance and general cheer. This was too good to 
last. The avai'icious contractors made new poles, 1 3 inches 
instead of 12 to the foot. The day's task was unaccount- 
ably lengthened by an hour or more. The blacks could 
offer no explanation and made no resistance, for the 
work was still within the range of cheerful diligence. 
Another month passed by and a third set of poles were 
distributed. The foot had now become 14 inches long 
and the day's task lasted until sunset.* The defrauded 
labourers, seeing that there was no use struggling with an 
unjust despotism, returned to plantation-habits, shirked 
all the work they could, lost heart and fell back into that 
barbarism the essence of which consists in giving up the 
soul a prey to the forces of nature. The contractors had 
overshot their mark ; and so one of these monuments of the 
high civilization of the nineteenth century served only to 
remind the spectator of the aboriginal condition of the 
races of mankind before they had learned to hope to better 
their miserable plight. 

Rain, hail, and snow, and the furious piercing north 
wind were the slave-drivers of that age. The perpetual 
growth of the forest and the rapid increase of wild ani- 
mals were the measuring-rods which mysteriously length- 
ened out their task. No wonder that despondency grew 
out of ignorance, and barbarity out of despair. It is hard 
to comprehend the possible beginnings of civilization in a 
wilderness of forests and mountains, pelted with storms 
and horrible with the cries of wild beasts. Yet such was 

* The difference in the tasks, it should be remembered, is to be estimated 
in cubic measure. 

One cubic foot \i x 12 x 12 = 1728' 
„ „ measure 13 x 13 x 13 = 2197, nearly 28 per cent. more 

than a true cubic foot. 
One cubic measure 14 x 14 X 14 = 2794, nearly 60 per cent, more 

than a true cubic foot. 



Vl."] SOCIAL LIFE OF MAN. 125 

Europe down to a recent date, i.e. to within a few centu- 
ries of the Christian era. Such was all North America 
two hundred years ago with the exception of a few river 
bottoms^ a few glades and a few estuary marshes on the 
seacoast. In Europe also such places early became refuges 
and nurseries for man. It is therefore in the open plain 
of Languedoc, on the borders of the delta of the Rhone, 
and on the great chalk basin of central and northern 
France and southern England that relics of the most 
ancient races have been chiefly found. But even here 
they are commingled with the remains of tigers and 
hyenas, wild boars and bulls, the bear, the wolf and the 
deer, and even of the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus and 
the elephant, in such numbers and of such a size as to tell 
a plain story of the most savage existence. When we re- 
member that the only weapons which the men of the cave 
had at their command were fire, and the bow and arrow, the 
flint hatchet fastened to its wooden handle with a willow- 
withe or a shrunken piece of deer-skin, or the pike pointed 
with a reindeer prong or a wild boar's tusk; and that the 
only farming implement they knew of was a paddle of 
flint, chipped thin and broad and worked by hand without 
a handle, our wonder grows how civilization could have 
found a time and starting-point. 

It was no doubt in order to avoid their natural 
enemies the wild beasts, and perhaps also to defend 
themselves against each other, that some tribes whose 
hunting-grounds lay neighbouring to lakes betook them- 
selves to a peculiar mode of life. They planted upright 
logs in the lake bottom, supporting them with heaps of 
stones, and lashing them together with wicker-work. On 
these they laid a wooden platform communicating with 
the shore by a wooden bridge or causeway. On this 
platform stood their wigwams. Here the women and 
children were comparatively safe when the men were on 
shore hunting, or farming or at war. On the edges of the 
platform they sat to fish. In the centre of each wigwam 
perhaps was a layer of earth to cook their fish upon. 
Trap-doors in the village floor received the oflfal, the bones 
of animals after the marrow had been extracted, fragments 
of broken pottery, the waste of spoiled nets and ruined 
weapons. Hundreds of the sites of these villages have 



126 ON THE EARLY [lBCT. 

been recently discovered* in the lakes of Switzerland, 
Bavaria, and Austria, and thousands of such relics of their 
domestic life, but as yet only two skulls. f It is, therefore, 
certain, that these people were not habitual cannibals ; for 
in that case human skeletons would be abundant. It is 
equally evident that they either burned their dead or 
buried them on shore. That both these customs were pur- 
sued at different times we have good evidence. It is 
remarkable that the oldest skull yet found in these lake- 
dwellings presents us again with all the low-type features 
of the Neanderthal cranium ; great ridges over the orbits 
of the eyes, a suddenly retreating forehead, and extremely 
small capacity. It contained what seems an undeveloped 
brain ; but yet it could not have been (as some were in- 
clined to consider the Neanderthal cranium) the skull of an 
idiot. These people were far from being idiots. They 
were only animals. The essential difference between an 
idiot and an animal consists in this fact : the idiot, like 
the unborn foetus, is not aware of his relations to sur- 
rounding nature; his life goes on chemically, not con- 
sciously ; the animal on the contrary is wide-awake to his 
position and its demands. Indeed, the quickness and 
many-sidedness of this self-consciousness is the nicest scale 
we have by which to grade the animal creation. Behold 
the deer for instance; how alive to every sound and 
motion ! how skilful to hide ! how prompt to fly ! And 
yet I have myself stood for half an hour by my transit 
instrument in the woods of the Towanda Mountains, wait- 
ing until my men cut out a line down the long steep slope 
into a valley , and during all this time I have seen a deer 
stand motionless watching the brilliant spot of light which 
the sunbeams through the trees made on the brass cylinder 
of my telescope not fifty paces distant, unaware of my 
presence and unconscious of danger. In vain, says the 
poet of old, is the net spread in the sight of anj^ bird. 
The consciousness of its relations is not complete in any 

* Beginniug with the dry winter of 1853-4, Meilen, on Lake Zurich. 

t One (mentioned in Rutimeyer's Die Tauna der Pfahlbauten in der 
Schweitz, p. 181. Basel, 1861), at Meilen, on Lake Zurich, early stone 
period, called by Prof. His an intermediate type between the long and 
short -headed forms ; and, therefore, not like the small round heads of the 
Danish peat-mosses ; the other found by Desor, 1864, and referred to in 
the text. 



Vri.] SOCIAL LIFE OF MAN. 127 

animal ; but it is more complete in some than in others. 
The horse is superior to the deer ; yet the horse rushes 
into not out of a burning stable. The ape is superior to 
all animals below man^ because his powers of observation 
have more scope^ his comprehension of emergencies is 
more logical ; he shows an inventive genius harmonizing 
with this higher degree of self-consciousness, and hence 
he more perfectly imitates the brutal custom s, the virtues 
and the vices of mankind. The diflPerence between the ape 
and the civilized man lies in the limitation of the conscious- 
ness of the ape to his physical and passional relationships 
to nature ; while the self-consciousness of the civilized 
man deals also with the subjects of abstract thought and 
with the invisible and eternal worlds.* But this is the 
precise distinction between the cave or lake-dwellers of 
earlj Europe and the Londoner or Bostonian of to-day; 
and thus we are returned once more to the idea of the 
affiliation of the apes with mankind in the early stages of 
its existence. 

That these old lake-dwellers were in no respects idiotic 
is evident from the very nature of the case : a race of 
idiots could no more continue to exist than unborn chil- 
dren could. But their handicraft is still more conclusive 
evidence. In the museum of M. Troyon of Lausanne I 
had the pleasure of examining a piece of a door, half- 
burned, consisting of three boards two of which lay side 
by side but not rabbited together ; the third board crossed 
the other two at right angles to hold them together ; but 
instead of being nailed or pegged fast to them, it was as 
regularly dovetailed into them as a carpenter of our days 
would have done it. I saw also among these curious 
objects pieces of twisted thread and knotted net. Their 
clothes were probably of skins, and loom-weaving was as 
yet unknown, but specimens of plaited cloth have been 
found. I saw needles of bone to sew with ; and pieces of 
charred baked bread in the form of flat round cakes ; and 
grains of wheat and barley. The small wild apple and 
pear of the Swiss woods have also been dredged up, wild 
plum-stones, and beech and hazel-nuts in great alDund- 
ance. 

• I will return to this subject in the beginning of the Tenth Lecture. 



128 ON THE EARLY [lECT. 

How pleasant it would be to have a dinner-scene of 
those days by Teniers, or a page of table-talk by Cole- 
ridge ! What a contrast would it present to the Bound 
Table of Arthur and his paladins ! or to a d^jevtier at 
the Maison Dore in 1865 ! The table can be seen^ with its 
dish, in the Museum of the Irish Academy ; but where are 
the guests ? It was discovered in a peat-bog in County 
Tyrone^ ten feet beneath the surface. The table and the 
dish were each scooped out of a, solid piece of wood, 
apparently fir. An oblong table, with its ends curved in- 
ward, and set on four short legs four and a half inches 
high, truncated cones connected at their bases by a low 
rim in which are two cord holes ; and an oval dish four or 
five inches deep, in its edge two holes answering to the 
two holes in the rim of the table, and probably slung to it 
on the back in travelling. Beside the dish lay a large heap 
of hazel-nuts, probably an autumnal hoard just gathered 
foi- winter^s use. Perhaps they were uproariously enjoy- 
ing their repast when interrupted by the rush of some 
carnivorous beast scattering their merriment.* 

How long the ages were during which these lake-dwell- 
ings were inhabited we do not know. We know that they 
existed still in the days of Herodotus ; and the Swiss 
antiquaries believe that those of Neville and Chavannes 
in the Canton de Vaud continued to be dwelt on to the 
Vlth century after Christ. There are sufficient evidences 
in the articles found to distinguish them as of very differ- 
ent ages. The iron age of the Romans is represented j 
the preceding age of bronze ; and a still more ancient age 
of stone, perhaps going back to the times succeeding the 
retreat of the Swiss glaciers. We cannot tell therefore 
at what time wild apples, plums, and berries were ex- 
changed for wheat and barley bread; nor when the skins 
of beasts were replaced by plaited cloth. The best scale 
of years we have is got from Rutimeyer^s list of the 
animals on which these ancients fed, and especially by the 
marked change from wild to domestic flesh. In all of the 
lake-dwelling deposits, even the oldest, we find the bones 
of the domesticated ox, sheep, goat and dog; and inter- 
mixed with these in various localities bones of the horse 
and ass, bones of the elk and stag, the roe and fallow-deer^ 

* O'Callighau, Proc. Geol. and P. S., W. R. Yorkshire, p. 315,1863-4. 



VI.] SOCIAL LIFE OF MAN. 129 

the ibex and the chamois^ tlie bison and wild bull, the 
small swamp-hog and the great wild boar, the wolf and 
fox, the bear and the badger, the marten, polecat, ermine, 
and weasel, the otter and the beaver, the hedgehog, 
squirrel and fieldmouse, the wildcat and the hare, the 
frog and the tortoise, the wild swan, goose, two kinds of 
ducks and fifteen other kinds of birds. All that contained 
marrow are found split open : this is invariably the case 
with those of the bull and bison. In the most ancient 
villages, like those of Wangen and Moosseedorf, the 
evident predominance of bones of the wild stag and roe 
over those of tame cattle show a decided preference of the 
chase to a more civilized mode of life ; the tame pig is 
wanting, goats outnumber sheep, the fox was an habitual 
dish. 

When the bronze age opened, the Lithuanian aurochs or 
bison (bos bison, bos priscus) ceased to be eaten * and the 
savages began to tame the great wild bull (bos urus, or 
primigenius) which Oeesar describes as still existing in his 
day, fierce, swift, and strong, and scarcely inferior to the 
elephant in size ; in its tamed state its bones became some- 
what less massive and heavy, and its horns somewhat 
smaller. At this time they added to the common dog, which 
aeems to have been their companion from the beginning, -j* a 
new large hunting dog ; and with it a small horse, which 
however must have been very rare among them. By this 
time the elk and beaver had become extirpated ; and the 
fox had ceased to be a fashionable article of diet. 

In looking over this list it seems very remarkable thai' 
two animals are absent from it which we should have sup- 
posed almost the very first to be discovered. Of the hare 
only one single fragment of a bone has as yet been found ; 
and we can only explain its absence by Osesar^s account 
of the holy horror with which the Britons of his day re- 
garded it and with which the Laplanders, who represent 
the ancient hyperborean race in Europe, still regard it. Of 
the domestic cat also there is not a trace until we come 
down to the very youngest villages, those assigned to the 
Vlth century. J And this again is in curious harmony with 

* Protected by Czars in one Lithuanian forest, to tlie present day. 
t The oldest of man's gods, the Anubis of Egypt. 
X Lyell, Ant. of Man, p. 26. Desor's Palafittes. Smithson, Cont. ISbC. 

9 



130 ON THE EAELY [lBCT. 

iLie fact that no trace of tlie cat exists on the most ancient 
monuments of Egypt.* 

The absence of the reindeer, on the other hand, is merely 
an evidence of tho far inferior antiquity of these lalre- 
dwellings to those remains of man which hare been found 
ill the caves of France. 

I have said enough to give you a picture of long middle 
stages in the primeval history of European humanity in 
Switzerland. But it is necessary to say a few more words 
about its phases farther north. Let us look for a moment 
at a more inhospitable region. Let me ask you to keep in 
mind that in every age, no matter how far back we go, we 
find men living everywhere ; living under different circum- 
stances, but living everywhere. I shall say something in 
due time about migrations. But I wish you to observe 
just now that theories of migration are the most unsatis- 
factory products of science. In days preceding the oldest 
migrations of which we can obtain any glimpse the entire 
surface of the earth seems to have been just as completely 
settled as it is to-day. In the Stone age, while the 
Helvetian aborigines were platting cloth and cooking 
domestic cattle on elaborately constructed platforms in the 
lake-waters of the south a race of utter savages were 
sitting around fires on the shores of the Baltic with not 
a single domesticated animal to call their own except the 
dog, and that a smaller species ; gnawing the fiesh and 
splitting the marrow-bones of wild bulls now extinct, of 
foxes, wolves, and lynxes, red-deer and roes ; beavers long 
since extinct, and seals now very rare; with penguins and 
capercailzies, both now extinct in Scandinavia. But I am 
wrong to call them utter savages, for they had already 
learned the art of boat-building,t and were bold fishermen, 
as we can see by the bones of herring, cod, and flounders 
which are found among the mounds of kitchen trash which 
liae the shores and mark their haunts. But they were not 

* Mariette's Researches. Renan's article in the Revue des Deux 
Mondes, April, 1865. 

f Rude canoes scooped from trunks are often found in British peat- 
bogs, sometimes with theft* short clumsy paddles, and in rare instances, a 
rope of moss or heather, attached to a stone close by, showing the primi- 
tive mode of anchorage. A very perfect specimen lately discovered in the 
valley of the Aire, is in the museum at Leeds. But such canoes are of 
all ages. (O'Callighan, Proc. Geol. Pol. S. W. R. York. 1863-4, p. 314. 



VI.] SOCIAL LIFE OF MAN. 131 

cannibals. No human bones make these heaps horrible. 
In spite of the over-confident assertion of Mr John Craw- 
ford who said in a recent debate upon the carnivorous 
Esquimaux that so far as his researches went they were 
the only exception to the fact that the ancestors of every 
race of man had been at one time or another cannibals. 
The occasional eating of human flesh by shipwrecked 
mariners does not make a British nation a race of canni- 
bals.* Skulls have been disinterred from peat-bogs and 
from graves believed to be of the same period — ^which 
skulls are small and round, with massive bones above the 
eyes resembling those of the pigmy race of modern Lap- 
landers. The skulls of the bronze and iron ages found in 
the upper layers of the Danish peat-bogs are both longer 
and larger, and belonged no doubt to a race that invaded 
the Baltic regions afterwards. 

We have the means at hand for reconstructing in imagin- 
ation the three different conditions of those northern 
lands during their inh.abitation by three successive races. 
Taking the last first — in Roman times the Danish isles 
were covered with a magnificent forest of beech, which still 
exists. This is the tree of the iron age. Its logs are 
abundant in the topmost layers of those peat-bogs which 
are so numerous in the north, and in which the skeletons 
of lost men with large long skulls are sometimes found 
with iron arms and implements. Beneath these top layers 
lie others deeper down, but how much older we know not, 
the logs in which are all of oak. Oak was the forest of the 
age of bronze. In the peat-layers no iron is found, and 
very few skeletons; because the people of that age burned 
their dead and buried their ashes in urns beneath grave 
mounds. How many thousands of years this age of oak 
woods and funereal fires stretched backward we know not. 
But behind it lie the vaster ages of the stone period. The 
lowest layers of peat contain neither logs of beech nor logs 
of oak; their embedded trunks are chiefly of Scotch ^ir. 

* Proc R. Geog. Soc, Jan. 23, 1865. Kane and others have testified 
to the improvidence of the Esquimaux, and to their actually starving in 
midwinter when calm weather and the neap-tides permit tlie sea to freeze 
over, and the wah-us have to seek vvnter in the ofEng. In 1854-5 they 
were compelled to eat their dogs, but not a case of cannibalism is known 
to have occurred among them. — But see facts stated in Lecture X. 



132 ON THE EARLY [lECT. 

The savages of those remote times lived in the true Cim- 
merian darkness of the pines ; and their relics are the long 
heaps of oyster- shells, cockles, and other edible molluscs, 
plentifully mixed in with the remains of quadrupeds, birds 
and fish the catalogue of which I have already given you. 
Scattered throughout these heaps are found flint knives 
and instruments of bone and horn, coarse potsherds, char- 
coal and cinders, but not a trace of either iron or bronze. 
Yet the polish given to the stone knives and hatchets show 
that even this ancient age is not so infinitely remote from 
ours either in time or in barbarism as that of the people 
of the diluvium and earlier caves, to say nothing of possible 
relics in the tertiary deposits.* 

See how all civilization is relative. As we look down 
these slopes of a foregone eternity deeps yawn in deeps, in 
each a deeper still. 

See also on what delicate threads of evidence such demon- 
strations hang. A single herring-bone in a hundred acres 
of oyster-shells — a single file-scratch on a golden torque 
found in a Druid barrow, tells the whole story. It is_the 
master-trick of genuine science ; Agassiz constructing the 
whole fish from a single scale ; Leverrier detecting the 
skulking Neptune by a ripple in the orbit of Uranus. But, 
as I have said already, the method must be sound, the 
starting-point well known, or the result will be a lie. 
What I have given you this evening are the well-estab- 
lished and universally accepted results of many years of 
careful investigation by all the arch^ologists of northern 
Europe, led by such masters as Wors«, Nilsson, Steenstrup 
and Thompson, Wilson and Lubbock t and Busk, and with 
all the resources of geology at their command. Hundreds 

* The oyster is no longer to be found in the Baltic shores ; and the 
periwinkle {cardium edule) which still grows there is a variety dwarfed by 
the brackishness of the Baltic water since the ocean was shut out from it 
by the gradual rise of the Scandinavian peninsula, at the observed rate of 
two or three inches in a century. The absence from these kitchen heaps 
of the raammoth and rhinoceros is not so extraordinary as is that of the 
aurochs and reindeer, for the first two may have become extinct at an ear- 
lier period in this latitude. 

t See Morlot's Mem. in Bull. Soc. Vaud, vi. ISfiO, Lausanne; trans- 
lated in 8th contrib. Smith. Inst., Washington, and abstracted by Lyeli 
in Ant. Man, p. 8. 



VI.J SOCIAL LIFE OP MAN. 133 

of peat-bogs have been seai'clied^ thousands of tumuH have 
been opened, miles of shell-heaps have been explored, and 
that beneath the jealous criticism of all Europe. In the 
sober judgment of well-informed men this much may be 
considered settled : that a general advance in civilization 
is perceptible in the past history of man during what may 
be roughly stated as the stone, the bronze, and the iron 
periods, or, if you prefer to call them so, the ages of the 
pine, the oak, and the beech woods ; that the men of the 
stone age were savage hunters and fishermen, of small 
stature and low intellect ; that the men of the bronze age 
came in from other lands bringing with them the know- 
ledge of metallurgy, a taste for beauty and religious feel- 
ings which led them to burn their dead ; and that the men 
of the iron age were of still another race and country, 
large of stature, long-headed warriors, with iron swords 
and iron ploughs, builders of forts and ships, restless in- 
vaders, fond of state, accumulators of property, oppressors 
of the ancient peoples, and the natural progenitors of the 
Berseckers and Jarl kings who in the years of written 
history conquered the west and south of Europe and laid 
the basis broad for the eminent civilization of our modern 
times.* 

Will any one be so far influenced by the prejudices of 
scholastic education as to insist on a reversal of this order 
of civil development ? Will any one maintain that man- 
kind, although at first created in some Eden a little lower 
than the angels, full of strength and beauty and endowed 
with supernatural intelligence, lords of the fowl and the 
brute, tilling the soil and adorning their homes with beau- 
tiful works of art, were nevertheless compelled by wrath 
divine against a mythical sin to wander out towards the in- 
hospitable north, fell into want and misery and lost their high 
prerogatives, abandoned their generous habits, forgot their 
faculties, grew savage, and became at last the wretched 
outcasts whose remains are mingled with the bones of ex- 
tinct beasts and fishes of the sea on the Scandinavian 
shores ? Let such a one remember that so far as our 
knowledge of history goes, so far as all the facts have been 

* Nat. Hist. Review, 1861, &c. And two volumes published 1865, 
'Prehistoric Times.' Williams and Norgate, Lend. 2 Vols. See 'West- 
minster Review,' July, p. 126. 



134 ON THE EARLY [LECT. 

collected no single instances of such, a degradation can be 
cited in support of sucL. a theory. Men^ so far as we know, 
have always increased their stock of knowledge and power 
instead of losing it. The law of invasion has been a law 
of development. Races have always elevated and ennobled 
each other. Their wanderings have been like the steps of 
a conflagration, the farther it goes the fiercer it burns. 
The Persian love of flowers becomes a national mania 
when transplanted to the icy banks of the Neva. The 
smelting of copper once discovered in Armenia could no 
more be forgotten in Sweden and Norway than the love 
of Christ can become extinct in California. A race may 
die out, but not its ideas ; except by giving place to truer 
truths and lovelier lovelinesses. Civilizations to be edu- 
cated may be forced to make the tour of the world ; but 
they are not rolling stones that gather no moss. The 
mariner^ s needle of the distant east may have to wait a 
thousand years before it finds a box and dial-plate in Italy; 
but sooner or later it will be rectified for iron ships upon 
the Atlantic. It maybe the year of our Lord 1862 before 
Blake and Pumpelly shall teach the miners of Japan how 
to make a blast with their own gunpowder; but do you 
suppose those islanders will ever, to the end of time allow 
that splendid trick to be again forgotten ? Has not the 
whole movement of the human race been from the poles 
towards the equator ? From ice and darkness and misery 
towards the sunlight and the grape ? Have we a single 
fact -to show that the movement was ever in the other 
direction ? Science cannot resign to a theological con- 
jecture. Until incontrovertible facts are offered as an 
argument against it we must continue in our reasonings 
to follow the course of nature as we know it, and say that 
barbarism everywhere on earth preceded civilization ; and 
accept the order of the Danish peat-bogs as the symbol of 
the order of the aboriginal development of the races of 
mankind. 

'As has been truly observed,' says Mr Lubbock in a 
speech before the R. Geographical Society,* ' man, in the 
earlier times of which we have any relics, appears to have 
been not only a savage, but a savage living under Arctic 

* Jan. 23, 1865, p. 61 



VI.] SOCIAL LIFE OF MAN. 186 

conditions.' Therefore the accounts which Kane and Ross 
before him have given us of the isolated race of Esquimaux 
living on the west coast of Greenland between the two 
great prongs of the Humboldt glacier and so completely- 
cut off from the rest of the world that they would not be- 
lieve Ross when he said he had come to them from the 
south — are of surpassing interest to us. These Arctic 
Highlanders contend with nature for a chance to live under 
the extremest disabilities. They have no boats, and there- 
fore cannot follow their food when it migrates. They have 
no fish-hooks, and therefore cannot live on fish. They have 
neither bow nor arrow, and therefore to them the herds of 
reindeer which range unmolested on the barren uplands at 
the base of the great glaciers, the Sernik Soak or great Ice- 
wall • as they call it, which hems them in, are valueless. ' They 
have never been seen to partake of a single herb, or grass, 
or berry grown upon the shore/ says Osborne,* ' and of 
vegetables and cereals they have of course no conception.* 
No other people on earth are known to be so entirely carni- 
vorous. Kane calls them an expiring race , but he famishes 
for the support of this assertion no good evidence. As Ross 
found them in 1818 Kane saw them in 1854 ; only they had 
become friendly instead of being hostile to their visitors. 
Without driftwood, except a fragment of wreck at rare in- 
tervals, and with only a small supply of meteoric iron and 
a few wrecked iron hoops, they could make no weapons 
but bone knives, bone harpoons, and bone lances with 
which they attack and kill white bears and seals and wal- 
ruses with the help of dogs. With nets they catch in 
summer vast numbers of the delicious little auk or penguin. 
They have in use the identical form of skin-scraping tools 
which have been found so abundantly in the diluvial and 
cave deposits of Europe, flat on one side, convex on the 
other, round at one end and pointed at the other. But 
as supplies of meat in such cold countries can be preserved 
for a long time we may find in these carnivorous habits of 
the present Esquimaux a new and more satisfactory ex- 
planation of the vast numbers of animal skeletons which 
are found in the old caves, if we suppose the ancient in- 
habitants of Europe to have been an Arctic and carnivorous 

* Jan. 23, 1865, p. 50. 



lo6 ON THE EARLY [LECT, 

race.* In spite of all ttie disadvantages of their situation, 
' all who have seen these people describe the men as square 
built, hearty fellows, deep-chested, bass-voiced, and meriy- 
hearted ; and the women, good souls, as tender and sympa- 
thetic in their quaint way; for it-'s not every Europeanmother 
who would lend a nice warm babe to make a soft pillow for a 
weary traveller, as the ladies of Etah did ; and fair enough 
to win the hearts of some on board of the Advance. 
Kane^s faithful hunter Hans abandoned him for love of 
Shanghu's pretty daughter, who had nursed him when 
wounded in a walrus hunt. These people live as far north 
as 80°, and there are indications that Esquimaux settlements 
may even be found at the very pole.f 

In strong contrast with the well -authenticated, well-com- 
pacted, and in all respects sober mass of information which 
the northern antiquarians have put at our disposal stand 
the isolated and ill-confirmed reports of tertiary men such. 
as those of the Abbe Bourgeois __ and M. Desnoyers ; and 
also the extraordinary theories of enthusiasts like MM. 
Brouillet and Meillet, based upon — mistakes. But when 
we remember the wild conjectures to which Phcenician 
letters on the Grave-mound amulet in western Virginia 
gave rise, and the numerous forgeries of Oriental human 
relics in our Western States which have been reported from 
time to time, it is not unuseful to observe how such aber- 
rations may be possible even to the most advanced science 
of Europe. These gentlemen have lately published an ac- 
count of certain bone-caves in Poitou J from which they 
have obtained animal remains similar to those found in 

* Kane and others found that the Esquimaux kill the walrus rapidly 
in the spring, and heap their bodies on the shore, piling rocks over the 
heap, while they kill more ; but like all savages, they are so thoughtless 
that these caches putrify in the summer ; for they never seem to think of 
making them in the ice-caves of the adjacent glaciers. All this proves 
how tenacious human life is. Kane says that the Arctic winter temper- 
ature stood for three months at— 60'' to 75° Fahrenheit. But human life 
is tenacious of the earth only where animal life is so ; the enormous walrus 
suckles its young in midwinter at 77° lat. ; so do the herds of seals feed- 
ing on fish. But the walrus seems to feed on sea-weed alone. At any 
rate ihe glacial period in Europe could no more extirpate the cave-dwell- 
ing race than the Arctic winters can the Esquimaux. (Proc. E.. Geog. 
Soc, p. 65, Jan. 23, 1865.) 

t Reiterated by Mr C. E. Markham, Proc. Geog. Soc, Jan. 23, 1865. 

% See Westminster Review, July, 1865, p. 121. 



VI .1 SOCIAL LIFE OP MAN. 137 

other caverns in France, scratclied and marked by man. 
On some of tliem are Sanscrit letters, not so arranged 
however as to be pronounceable in words or syllables; 
and two of tliem are scratclied upon a bone representing 
a phallus. From these assumed Sanscrit letters they con- 
clude that the cave-people of France were emigrants from 
Asia ; that the written language of Arya was of enormous 
antiquity; that the probable date of the relics is 24,000 
years B.C. ; that at that time there occurred one of those 
periodical cataclysms which desolate the earth and drive 
the races to and fro ; that another, taking place about 
14,000 B.C., was the debacle produced by the breaking up 
of the antarctic polar ice ; and that a third was brought 
about in 2350 B.C. by a similar breaking up of the ice- 
cope around the Ai-ctic pole. 

Unfortunately for this fine theory M. Pictet of Geneva, 
pronounces that these letters, although actually Sanscrit, 
have been unskilfully selected from one of the more modern 
forms of that alphabet ! Setting aside however the stu- 
pidity of the forgery, the hypothesis judged upon its own 
merits, melange as it is of scientific and unscientific ele- 
ments, can hardly hold together long enough for us to 
look at it. We might almost as well accept the Greek 
or Hebrew fables of a universal deluge; a phenomenon 
which we well know to be physically impossible ; for the 
most tremendous rain-fall does not exceed six inches per 
hour and so completely desiccates the atmosphere that it 
can last but a short time ; whereas, even if it continued in 
full force for forty days and nights the entire amount 
would only be some 6000 inches, or 500 feet. If all the 
aqueous vapour in the atmosphere were to be condensed at 
once it could not elevate the sea level by 60 feet. Nor is 
modern science aware of the existence of any ' fountains of 
the great deep ' to be broken up to supplement the defi- 
ciency. And if, as some have been willing to suppose, the 
divine hand could have pressed down some one area of the 
crust of the earth so as to permit the ocean to rush in and 
cover it, the only consequence of that would have been to 
drain off extensive areas elsewhere and thus increase the 
amount of land left dry. 

When we introduce the idea of cataclysms therefore 
into ethnology we must carefully limit their magnitude 



138 ON THE EARLY [lECT. 

and define tlieir causes^ wholly irrespective of tlie fanciful 
or allegorical stories of the ancient poets ; remembering 
moreover how the ignorance of men predisposes them to 
enlarge and dignify their personal and local misadventures 
into universal disasters to the human race. 

Too great a cataclysm would extirpate nations instead 
of transferring them from one domain to another. We 
must lessen the cause if we wish to produce the required 
effect. Had the melting of the Swiss glaciers been the 
sudden result of the instantaneous emergence of the Sahara 
desert and the immediate creation of the Sirocco winds 
the aboriginal population of Europe would have been 
swept by a double deluge into the surrounding seas. But, 
as we know, the African portion of the ancient Mediter- 
ranean was cut off from the European portion of it so 
slowly by the gradual accumulation of gravel bars between 
the Carthaginian and Cyrenian coasts, and the drying up 
of the African waters must have been a process so de- 
liberate and so apart from any noticeable change of level as 
to land and sea, that the melting of the glaciers may have 
occupied the lifetime of a generation of cave-dwellers, and 
produced no change of cHmate nor of soil to which they 
were not amply competent to adapt themselves. 

Truth needs a good perspective. A hill looks always 
steeper from its foot or from its summit than when we 
are upon its sides. So the foreshortening of time, re- 
garded with a backward glance, piles up the thousand 
minor incidents of some slow change into one mighty 
crisis, and we stand amazed and terrified at the possibiliiy 
of the recurrence in our day of what were it really to 
happen would no more trouble us than any of the ordi- 
nary common-place experiences of life. 

It is not a general deluge then, it is an ordinary inun- 
dation which mankind has to fear. A freshet, as we call 
it, a famine, a pestilence, a murrain in their flocks and 
herds, the loss of timber by the conflagrations of a year of 
drought — these are real cataclysms of human history j pro- 
ducing poverty and desperation, exciting insurrections 
against established governments, bursting into a blaze of 
civil war, and ending with the expulsion of the unfortunate 
to seek and settle upon other lands. Wlien once the im- 
pulse is established in some distant and perhaps unheard- 



VI.] SOCIAL LIFE OF MAN. 1S9 

of portion of tlie population of tlie world it propagates 
itself from tribe to tribe and from race to race, those be- 
hind precipitating themselves upon those in front, and those 
attacking having the usual advantage over those attacked, 
until a whole continent is ethnologically shifted forward 
one degree, while some pre-eminently vigorous stock may 
have even penetrated through half of the moving mass and 
planted itself in the very heart of an entirely alien race. 
Such was the case of the hyperborean Hungarians, now 
surrounded by Sclavonians ; and such was every way the 
case with the estabhshment of the Yandals in northern 
Africa, of the Saracens in Spain and southern France, of 
the Turkomans in Greece, and of the Hyksos in ancient 
Egypt, who probably crossed, like the Turks of modern 
days, the whole of central Asia, from the northern borders 
of the Chinese empire. 

We are too apt to regard political revolutions as the 
work of politicians. Far from it. Websters and Calhouns 
are merely maggots in the fermenting cheese, bred of it, 
and feeding on it, but not much more than illustrations of 
its Hveliness. We must find the causes of political revo- 
lutions in the masses of the people. Fat folks love ease 
and hate the clash of arms. The wolves of the Pyrenees 
descend into the villages not until they are gaunt-ribbed 
and hollow-eyed with famine. Throw multitudes out of 
employment, — it is like dipping a handful of cotton-wool 
into sulphuric acid ; you turn it into gun-cotton, and any 
spark will explode it so as to tear your hand in pieces. 
Thus are governments destroyed. 

Look at any good chart of the region of China around 
the capital city of Pekin. You will notice there the course 
of the mightiest river in the world, the Yello"vj River, 
Hoang-ho, which drains the central parts. of Asia. You 
will notice also a range of mountains (running north and 
south directly in its path to the gulf of Pechele), which one 
of our geologists, Mr Pumpelly, believes to have been 
elevated at a recent date. Through this range the river 
once passed directly to the sea by what is now the bed of 
another river, the Pei-ho. But by a subsequent re-eleva- 
tion of this mountain- chain the great river, turned at a right 
angle southward, has been compelled to seek along the west- 
em foot of the ridge its passage 350 miles farther south 



140 ON THE EARLY [lECT. 

fchan the gap through which it used to go before. Here it 
turBs east, goes through, and takes its unobstructed way 
to the Yellow Sea. The country between the mountains 
and the sea is a low plain traversed by numerous ancient 
river-beds, a vast delta which the river has been slowly 
and steadily reclaiming from the ocean for no one knows 
how long. In old Chinese municipal records many of the 
ancient cities which now stand miles and even leagues 
back from the shore are described as seaports with good 
harbours when they wei'O first built. You will also notice 
a high mountainous promontory projecting from the middle 
of the delta into the sea; this was an island once. The 
delta has been formed around its western end by the Yel- 
low River changing its bed alternately to the right and to 
the left with a motion precisely like that of the head of a 
silkworm when spinning its cocoon. At the last meeting 
of the National Academy at Northampton, Mr Pumpelly 
exhibited a chart of this delta, constructed for him by a 
learned Chinese scholar whom he employed to search the 
historical records of the province, so that he could lay 
down the different courses which the mighty stream had 
taken under the different dynasties of Chinese emperors, 
debouching alternately on the two sides of the central 
promontory. There is a Chinese story, that after a deluge 
which destroyed mankind the great king, Yu, first em- 
peror of the first dynasty, B.C. 2100, built dykes to confine 
the river to its then existing bed. This care of the Yellow 
River became the hereditary policy of all succeeding em- 
perors, a sine qua non for any dynasty however powerful. 
For, as the river filled up its bed until its surface level 
stood 50 and 60, and as the Jesuits say even 90 feet above 
the surrounding country, the least remissness threatened 
incredible calamities. The delta was exceedingly fertile; 
its population was the densest in the world; its level 
surface could afford no shelter from destruction were the 
banks to break ; fiight might save individuals but in 
a state of utter destitution, for the highlands were a hun- 
dred miles away ; the flocks and herds would surely perish ; 
and the river, swollen for the occasion, would plough a 
broad, deep avenue of annihilation through the sites of 
towns and cities to its new mouth upon the farther side 
of the peninsula. In the face of all these terrors, and they 



VI.] SOCIAL LIFE OF MAN. 141 

were no imaginationSj for they liad been repeatedly realized, 
tlie governmeut officials would periodically grow careless 
and venal ; tlie misappropriation to themselves of taxes 
levied to keep up the banks allowed those banks to be- 
come slowly weaker at every point, until some winter of 
uncommon snow upon the mountains would be followed 
by a late spring of uncommon heat ; the river would sud- 
denly overtop its insufficient banks and spread destruction 
over the whole delta. The destruction of life alone, to this 
over-populated region, although appalling, would be rather 
a blessing than a curse. English ships have been known 
to steam up all the way from Whampoa to Canton through 
a sheet of dead bodies like drift ice after such an inunda- 
tion of the Canton river. But the worst terrors of the 
event Isbf in the millions of unburied, putrifying corpses 
covering the fields; the starving myriads, women and 
children; and the desperate ferocity of armed brigands, 
wifeless, and childless, and houseless, and landless, and 
moneyless, moving from the scene of wrath and woe out- 
ward in all directions to spread disturbance through 
surrounding provinces. To suppress these armies of vaga- 
bonds armies of regulars and volunteers had to be em- 
ployed, which only increased the evils of the land. Con- 
tinual fighting turned the robbers into warriors, and the 
imbecility of the decaying dynasty which had been the 
original cause of failure in the river-dykes, became now 
the cause of its military overthrow. The records of China 
show that these changes in the course of the Yellow E/iver, 
happening at regular intervals of three or four centuries, 
have corresponded with as many imperial revolutions. We 
need not doubt that some of these revolutions, commenc- 
ing at the Yellow Sea, have set in motion waves of war and 
wandering which never stopped until they broke upon the 
Atlantic coast. 

But we are not to think that a millionth part of the 
water follows the wave. The form advances, but the equi- 
librium must be maintained. Persons, families, armies 
migrate ; but not the race. Were this not true we should 
see to-day the cat-eyed Mongol tethering his horse on the 
lands of western France. Hang up a row of ivory balls ; 
strike the first one ; what happens ? Do they all rush 
forward in a heap ? No, the last one only flies ; the rest 



142 ON THE EARLY [lECT. 

remain iu place. Thus the races of mankind have in the 
main retained their original seats by virtue of an elasticity 
inherent in all organized society even of the lowest grade ; 
yet propagating tidal waves of agriculture, commerce, 
mechanics, arts, politics, and religion from east to west, 
fusing the different races practically into one. 

There are other less striking but more powerful phy- 
sical causes of the out-wanderings of races ; such as the 
change of fertile countries into deserts, or of salubrious 
into pestilential air. But the physical sciences have not 
yet made these causes indisputably clear, and history has 
not preserved sufficiently plain records to enable us to 
judge of the events. Two instances of such, however, 
may be cited as well worthy of consideration. 

There is a range of desert country stretching a(Jross the 
map of the old world from the Atlantic shores of northern 
Africa, by Egypt and Arabia, Persia and Independent 
Tartary to the Chinese Wall. Its drought and conse- 
quent sterility connect themselves with certain grand and 
constant currents of the atmosphere ; as also do those 
similar but more restiicted deserts lying on each side of 
the Andes and the Rocky Mountains in America. 

But the removal of forests also has much to do with the 
production of desert lands ; for the forests modify the 
rain-fall. The Kalahari desert in southern Africa is gain- 
ing in extent, its rivers drying up, as Mr James F. Wilson 
says, because of the indiscriminate felling of timber by the 
natives and colonists combined ; the land once occupied by 
the frugal, thrifty Hottentots is now possessed by wastefiil 
Caflfros ; and iron axes are in everybody's hand where 
formerly an iron axe was a great rarity. Thus even an 
improvement of the highest value in the arts may give oc- 
casion for a fatal wrong to a portion of mankind. 

Mr Cyril Graham has shown that the anciently populous 
region of Hauran, to the east of Damascus, full of the ruins 
of great cities, became the uninhabitable desert it now is 
from the same cause. Generals Humphreys and Abbot 
of the United States army have demonstrated in the case 
of the Mississippi what Sir Roderick Murchison asserts 
of the Volga, that its volume of water has diminished by 
the settling and clearing of the upper country. The 
French revolution let loose the axe in the Pyrenees, and 



VI,] SOCIAL LIFE OF MAN. 143 

the people were fast turning tlie south of France into a 
desert^ when Napoleon restored the ancient law to protect 
the woods. Colonel Balfour has shown how the replanting 
of trees in India has re-opened its lost springs. Lord 
Stratford de RedcliflPe tells us that after speculators had 
obtained permission to cut the forest of Belgrade the 
contract had to be annulled ; for the reservoirs at Con- 
stantinople in consequence began to fail.* How much of 
the spread of the Arian race was due to the formation of 
the Persian deserts^ and that of the Hebrew race to the 
new sterility of Syria and Palestine, are curious questions 
for the cultivators of almost every branch of physical 
science to take some part in settling satisfactorily. 

There is still another class of causes affecting the migra- 
tion of races to illustrate the nature of which it is only 
needful to refer to the alleged destruction of the Indians 
of the United States by a universal pestilence previous 
to the appearance of the English colonists at Plymouth 
Rock ; and to that less apocryphal destruction of the same 
ill-fated race subsequently by syphilis and smallpox and 
scarlet fever and fire-water imported among the tribes 
from the homesteads of the whites. 

But as nature never repeats herself, so every migration 
that has ever taken place in history, or before history, had 
features of its own ; varying as it did from all others in its 
force and velocity, in its brilliancy, in its scope and out- 
spread, in its influence for good or evil, and therefore in 
its consequences at the present day. 

From the background of written history, two great mi- 
grations stand out pre-eminent — one which affected the 
religious development of the human mind, and one, in- 

* Proc. R. Geog. Soc, p. 106. May, 1865. Dr Livingstone, however, has 
refused his assent to this explanation. He vouches, indeed, for the facts, 
and gives instances of the drought of springs in his own garden, and names 
old water-beds, now dry, still called ' rivers ' by the natives ; but he ascribed 
the phenomenon to the rise of the western edge of the continent to a 
higher level above the sea, and to the production of fissures, like that of 
the Yictoria Tails, draining interior lakes, changing their levels, and 
making humid winds dry. Dr Kirk objects that wood in Central Africa 
is abundant on the Zambesi, and that there is an average amount of popu- 
lation, but insufficient to extirpate the forest, only using wood for fuel. 
He is, therefore, inclined to ascribe tlie dryness of 'Southern as well as 
Northern Africa to atmospheric currents. 



144 ON THE EARLY [lECT 

aug'urating the new era of universal liberty and Christian 
philanthropy : — the migration of the Abrahamic race into 
Palestine, two thousand years before the advent of Christ ; 
and the emigration of Anglo-Saxon colonists to the New 
World and to Australia. Of the latter it is not here the 
place to speak; but the other is more closely connected 
with our subject as it relates directly to the earliest civil- 
ization of the globe. I do not myself believe with entire 
confidence in the personal existence of the Jewish patriarchs. 
For you will find in the old Hindoo mythologies the names 
of Abram, Isaac, and Judah ranged in a similar order and 
connection. Brahma^s son Ikswaka was the great-grand- 
father of Yadu.* The Hebrews of Palestine were but a 
single twig of that wide-spreading branch of the Shemitic 
tree which had its original seats in central Asia, and mi- 
grating southward and westward over Persia, Mesopotamia, 
Arabia, and Syria entered Egypt under the name of 
Hyksos. We read in Genesis that Abram came from Ur of 
the Chaldees, which all the Fathers have considered to be 
Edessa or Orfa in the western division of northern Meso- 
potamia, nine miles from the Euphrates,t but which the 
excavations of the British consul, Mr Taylor, have shown 
to be in the south, near the junction of the Tigris and 
Euphrates.:!: 

We are also told in the book of Numbers (xiii. 22) that 
Hebron, the city of the Hebrews, and the head- quarters of 
the Abrahamites, was built by them seven years before 
Zoan, or Tanis, in Egypt, where are now to be seen the 
masterpieces of Hyksos architecture. 

You remember that Isaac had a legendary brother Esau, 
the father of the Arabian nomades. 

We must not judge this people by the Jew sutlers in 
the army of the Potomac ; nor by the three- crowned hat- 
pedlers, crying ' O^Clo' ! ' along the slums and stews of 

* Icswaca, Surya (the sun), Soma or Chandra (the moon), Yadu (Judah), 
Chahuman, Pramara, &c. Ant. Radjpoot MSS. A Sanscrit edition gives 
Icshwaca, Soma, Yadu, Pramara, &c. MSS. Index, H. 20. 

■f Callirrhoe in Pliny, v. 21 ; Antiochia ; Justinopolis ; and supposed 
to be the ae.k (ereck) ^.^s of Gen. x. 10. Two days' journey S.E. of it is 
Charrse (H.arran),the hrn (Harrau) 'Q'r^ of Gen. xi. 31, xii. 5, xxvii. 43, 
xxviii. 10, xxix. 4 ; 2 Kings xix. 12 ; Isaiah xxxvii. 12, and Ezekiel 
xxvii. 23. Here Crassus was defeated. 

t Proc. Geog. Soti. 1865, Jan. 9, p. 39. 



VI.] SOCIAL LIFE OF MAN. 145 

London. We must seek it in its native place, where it is 
a king. Not crouclied against the walls of the mosque of 
Omar at Jerusalem, but on horseback in the desert, swing- 
ing the scimitar or hurling the lance of the Saracen ; or 
in the professor^s chair at Cordova, translating, expound- 
ing, and enlarging all the philosophies of foregoing ages. 
We must regard those fine processions of tall, grave, long- 
robed merchants, entering the villages of Liberia and Sierra 
Leone; each man a judge of righteousness, incapable of 
levity or meanness, noble in speech and conduct, and propa- 
gating the faith of Islam to-day with the same zeal with 
which their fathers fought for it a thousand years ago. 
Study the Arabs in the Indian Ocean, on the islands of 
Java and Sumatra, surrounded by other races — Malays, 
Hindoos, Negroes, and Chinese — and you will not only 
acknowledge their supei'ior blood, but remark their con- 
sciousness of this superiority. To this Arab or typical 
Hebrew Shemite the old prophecy gives the tent ; and the 
Hamite and the Japhetite are to come into it to serve him. 
Arabs are the commercial masters of the tropics. Hebrews 
rule the politics of every government in Christendom by 
slips of paper from their counting-rooms. They have 
stamped their religious conceptions upon the written his- 
tory of half the globe. They have afforded to the world 
its noblest thinkers, its grandest poets, its most fiery 
orators, its sweetest musicians, its largest-minded mer- 
chants, and its most absolute martyrs to patriotism and 
conscience. Whence came then this grajid race, and 
where did it make its first appearance in history ? 

The recent discoveries of M. Mariette, perhaps the ablest 
and most successful of all explorers in the valley of the 
Nile, have conferred upon ethnology two inestimable boons. 
First, he has opened up a world of monuments relating to 
a part of Egyptian history about which we knew nothing, 
and the most interesting part of all — the earhest. And 
secondly, he has dispelled the last shades of doubt 
which hung about the authenticity of Manetho's lists of 
kings. His discovery of the monuments of the early 
Memphite dynasties will become important to us here- 
after when we discuss the architectural ideas of the ear- 
liest men. 

But the second point is of importance here. For M. 

10 



X46 ON THE EARLY [lBCT. 

Mariette, by placing it beyond dispute that the list of 
Egyptian dynasties and kings which Manetho gives us is 
not only genuine but constructed in the ordinary manner 
in which all governmental or oJBficial lists are constituted, 
viz. by taking only the legitimate sovereigns of the whole 
realm, and each one only for that time during which he 
reigned the acknowledged legal monarch - — has put an end 
to all attempts to shorten the Bg3rptian chronology upon 
the supposition that many of Manetho^s kings and even 
dynasties were contemporaneous — attempts made of 
course solely in the interest of the Rabbinical age of the 
world. The 6th dynasty, for instance, it was long supposed 
reigned at Elephantine in southern Egypt while the 7th 
was reigning with independent powers at Memphis in the 
north. But M. Mariette has disinterred monuments of 
both those dynasties on the sites of both their capitals, viz. 
at Elephantine in Upper Egypt, and at Sakkara near Mem- 
phis at the head of the Delta. Each dynasty therefore 
must have ruled over the whole kingdom ; and conse- 
quently the two dynasties could not have been contempo- 
raneous. 

In like manner the 13th dynasty which had its seat 
at Thebes must have preceded the 14th dynasty which 
had its seat at Xois^ because from the colossal statues of 
its kings discovered at San near Xo'is it must have reigned 
there also. 

For 1700 years before Christ, that is, from the end of 
the 17th dynasty, that of the Hyksos, onwards, the his- 
tory of Egypt is well known ; and in all this length of re- 
cord Manetho has been found correct ; he has not doubled 
any reign by inserting a contemporaneous ruler before or 
after it. We have no right therefore to suspect him of 
having committed this blunder in the earlier portion of his 
list. But such a blunder could only be intentional ; and 
he could have had no prejudice to serve by such a wilful 
sacrifice of truth in favour of a long chronology. His 
reputation is but just recovering from the load of obloquy 
which the Jews and their disciples the Protestant chrono- 
logists have heaped upon it, for no better reason than that 
they think they must make the history of all nations upon 
earth draw up its knees to lie within the child's cradle of 
the Hebrew scriptures. Father Jerome tells us how the 



VI.] SOCIAL LIFE OF MAN, 147 

Eabbis of Tiberias doctored these Hebrew scriptures 
by slipping back tbe birtli of the firstborn of each of the 
antediluvian patriarchs one hundred years upon his 
father's life, in order to bring the birth of Christ at the 
year 4000 of the world's creation^ instead of at the year 
6000. He tells us that their motive was to take the millen- 
nium argument out of the Christians' mouths. For the 
early Christians claimed against the Jews that Jesus must 
be the Messiah because he had come according to 
prophecy current among the Jews themselves at the dawn 
of the great Sabbath, the seven thousandth year. When 
we reject Manetho's list we do it in behalf of the Jews 
who chuckle at our simplicity; and we do it also in the 
face of the old Greek version of the Hebrew scriptures^ the 
chronology of which is 2000 years longer than that of King 
James' ti-anslation, showing us how the trick of the Jews 
was played. 

One of the most satisfactory evidences we have that 
Manetho did not double either his dynasties or his reigns 
is the fact that the hieroglyphic lists of kings^ especi- 
ally the new list lately discovered at Abydos, contain a 
multitude of kings' names which do not appear on 
Manetho's list at all.* During the rule of those fierce 
strangers^ the Hyksos, there were several native dynasties 
maintaining a precarious existence in various sections of the 
valley of the Nile ; but the great historian, true to his 
principle that kings de facto were the only kings de jure, 
refuses to insert in his list the names of these little native 
pretenders; he engrosses only the names of the Hyksos 
monarchs although foreigners and tyrants in his list of the 
l7th dynasty, because they really reigned.f 

A learned lady of England has exerted herself to prove 

* Consult not only Manetho, but Eratosthenes, and the tablets of 
Abydos, of Thebes, and of Sakkara, and the papyrus of Turin. The grand 
temple at Abydos. just discovered by Mariette, presents a new list, 
analogous to those we have already had, but admirably preserved. It is 
of the time of Sethos I., 1400 B.C. Sethos has selected 77 names of pre- 
decessors to make up his list, which ends like those of Manetho, and the 
Turin papyrus with Menes and Atothis, Touthmes III. (1500 B.C.) 
makes offerings to 61 predecessors, on the tablet iu the Imperial Library 
at Paris (Reucin). 

t Renan, Revue des Deux Mondes, April, 1865, g. 664. Mariette's 
AperQu. 



148 ON THE BAELY [lBCT. 

that these mysterious intruders into Egyptian history, the 
Hyksos, were the same people who are called in the early 
Hebrew writings the Susim (Hak-Sus, meaning ^king of 
the Susim ^), a mighty nation first heard of as inhabit- 
ing the Hauran country _, south of Damascus, and east of 
the Upper Jordan. Whether this be true or not, the first 
appearance of these nomades seems to be described upon 
the walls of the tombs of Beni Hassan, built under the 
12th dynasty, nearly 3000 years B.C. There the traveller 
beholds for the first time the pictures of processions of 
patriarchs with great eyes and aquiline noses,* coming with 
their wives and little ones, their poor utensils and instru- 
ments of music, to request the governor of Egypt to give 
them lands to dwell in, to escape a famine in their own. 
It is the story of Abraham, Jacob, and Joseph told by 
Egyptians ; the first pacific modest appearance of that ter- 
rible race which was to throw all Asia afterwards into dis- 
order, take possession of the land that succoured it and 
finally give the human race the grandest, the holiest and 
the most enduring part of its history. 

The distinguished Egyptologist, Dr Brugsch, and an 
advocate for the authenticity of the Mosaic account of the 
Exodus, states the accordance of the monuments with that 
account in a much better and more conclusive manner than 
Hengstenberg has done, and introduces into its scenery 
fresher tints. One chapter of his charming little book 
Aus dem Orient is entitled ' Moses and the Monuments,' 
and in this chapter he resumes all that the hieroglyphics 
are as yet known to teach about the Hebrews. Tanis, the 
Hyksos capital, called hieroglyphically hauar, Avaris, was 
besieged and taken by the first king of the 18th dynasty. 
Its Pharaohs effected the conquest of Asia, planting their 
furthest triumphal obelisks on the borders of Armenia, and 
returned with armies of captives to build innumerable 
monuments along both banks of the Nile. Pictures remain 

* But the Hyksos are described as red haired and blue eyed, which 
gives origin to the theory that they were the earliest appearance of the 
Gothic or Scandinavian race of the Iron age. Kenan remarks that the 
Hyksos monuments are at San, Tanis, or Zoan, a\';^>? }y^, which was 
founded seven years after Hebron, according to Numbers xiii. 22. 
Hebron was held by l^'^ini? (ahimn) ^pv (ssi) and "'a^r; (Glmi) the sons 
(■'T*^-') of Anak (yi^^). Here again we have Susim. 



▼I.] SOCIAL LIFE OF MAN. 149 

to US of these captives drawing water^ treading clay, 
spreading out and piling up their tales of bricks to build a 
temple with, under the supervision of Egyptian figures 
armed with rods. The 19th dynasty had for its first three 
kings, Eamses I., Seti I., and Ramses II., the great 
Sesostris, who reigned 66 years, and pushed his conquests 
north, east, south, and west. To guard his frontier against 
the Hittites of Palestine he forced his native Hyksos serfs 
and foreign military slaves to build a chain of forts across 
the isthmus of Suez, of which the principal were Ramses 
and Pithom (Pachtum, Pelusium), names mentioned in 
Exodus i. ii. as built by Hebrews under the tyrannical 
oppression of a Pharaoh (Theban pbr-aa, Memphite 
phBE-AO, means high house, or sublime porte), who knew 
not Joseph. One of the papyri of the British Museum, of 
the date of Ramses II. (1250 — ISOOb.c, Anastasi, iii. p. 1) 
is a description, by a scribe named Pinebsa to his master 
Amenemaput, of the aspect of things in and around the 
new city Ramses, — of the entrance into it of the great 
Pharaoh, — and of the petitions for relief against their 
overseers, which they thronged about him to present. 
Another papyrus reads : ' Sum of buildings 12, by people 
brought from their residences to make brick in the city ; 
they made their tale of bricks daily, without stopping 
until finished. Thus the task given me by my master has 
been accomplished.'' These conscripts were not Egyptians ; 
they were called apueu, Hebrews. They are often men- 
tioned on the stones and in papyri as at work, guarded by 
Mazai, the Libyan gendarmerie of Egypt. In a papyrus of 
the Leyden Museum, an employe of Ramses II. Kauitzir, 
reports to his upper scribe Bakenptah : ' May my lord be 
pleased with my execution of his assigned work, as follows : 
distribution of food to the soldiers, and to the Hebrews 
di'agging stones for the great city Ramses Meiamoun the 
truth-loving, under the oversight of police chief Amena- 
man. I gave them food monthly, according to my master^s 
excellent arrangement.'' A second papyrus in the same 
museum is written by one Keniaman to his superior, the 
Katena or general Hui : ' I have fulfilled my lord^s orders 
to give food to the soldiers as well as to the Hebrews who 
drag stones, &c.'' In the rock valley Hamamat, along 
which the great commercial route of Egypt from Coptos 



160 0]Sr THE EARLY [lECT. 

on tlie Nile to Berenice on the Eed Sea^ is an inscription 
describing the quarry work done by 9000 meii^ among 
whom was a squad of 800 Hebrews under escort of Mazai 
police^ who had brought the poor devils probably all the 
way from Goshen in the Delta. 

Now if the Hebrews^ story of their own wrongs and of 
their deliverance is to be believed^ we must suppose Joseph 
to have come down into Egypt under one of the Hyksos 
kings of the 1 7th dynasty, a Shemite like himself. When 
the native Pharaohs suppressed the Hyksos government 
they oppressed the Hyksos colonists who remained forming 
perhaps nearly the whole population of the eastern wing of 
the Delta. Moses was born say in the sixth year of 
Ramses II. , 300 years after Josephs day. In his tenth 
year Ramses entered his new city, built with Hebrew 
hands. Add to the remaining 60 years of his reign the 
20 years which his son Menephtha reigned, and we get 
the 80 years of age which Moses had when he led his 
people forth. 

Ramses II., like Caesar and Napoleon afterwards, was 
always in trouble, sitting on a throne planted over mines 
which any moment might explode. He made an ' extradi- 
tion treaty ' with Chetasar, king of the Hittites, who bound 
himself to return to Egypt all fugitive Hebrews found in 
Palestine ; and the same fearful policy might have actually 
gone the length of an edict of universal male Hebrew child- 
murder in view of the eventuality which the Hebrew 
Scripture thus expresses : ' for when a war arises, they may 
join our enemies and fight against us, and escape out of the 
land.^ Ramses and his successor added to this fierce 
oppression a religious seduction; they instituted an 
ostentatious worship of the sun-god Baal of the Shemite 
race. Ramses presented his own colossus (now in the 
Berlin Museum) to the temple of the sun in Zoan, where, 
says the poet of Psalms Ixxviii. 12, 43, Jehovah (by Moses) 
'' showed his wonders.'' Menephtha built no temples, but 
inscribed his own name on his fathers^ monuments with 
the title ' Worshipper of Sutech-Baal of Tanis,' and cut the 
image of Baal on the back of one of his own colossi with 
the figure of his son worshipping before it. 

The name Moses is now identified with the Egyptian 
MAS or MASSU, meaning ' the child,^ a name borne by many 



VI.] SOCIAL LIFE OF MAN. 151 

personages of that age^ one of whom is entitled on a monu- 
ment of the reign of Menephtha ' Viceroy of Ethiopia ; ' 
and this inscription probably gave rise to the assertion of 
Josephus that Moses^ when a young man^ led an Egyptian 
army into Ethiopia to besiege Meroe and married the 
princess Tharbe out of gratitude for her assistance in 
entering that city. The Hebrew story makes him the 
adopted son of Eamses^ daughter, and says that he was 
learned in all the customs of the Egyptians, as in fact 
might be inferred from the Hebrew ceremonial which 
bears his name, and the restricted monotheism which 
idealizes all the writings going by his name ; for in the 
roll of the dead deposited in Egyptian graves God is not 
named, but only designated as the nuk pu nuk, ' I Am 
what I Am,' precisely the title ' Jehovah' of the Pentateuch. 

At this point, however, all alliance between the monu- 
ments and the Mosaic story ceases. Several centuries 
elapse before the Sheshonk of the 22nd dynasty appears 
in Hebrew history as the Shishak who besieged Jerusalem. 
Of the Exodus, of the wanderings in the wilderness, of the 
settlement in Palestine the monuments say not one word. 
Coming directly from the land of hieroglyphic writing upon 
stone, and learned in the art, — ^leading a people who had 
not only had memorial sculpture before their eyes all their 
lifetime^ but had themselves built up the walls and set the 
statues, steles, and obelisks which bore descriptions of 
every public event, is it not an incredible supposition that 
Moses should have wrought such wonders, traversed such 
a length of route, encamped beneath the granite cliffs of the 
peninsula, and in the defiles of Mount Hor so many years, 
without leaving a trace of his existence, a line of writing, 
a letter, a scratch to authenticate his story, not even the 
two tablets on which he is said to have inscribed his deca- 
logue ! There are thousands of rude figures in the val- 
ley Mokatteb, and in other ravines descending from 
Mount Serbal, and they have been studied carefully by a 
multitude of scholars, under the strongest temptation to 
make them out Mosaic, but it has not been done. No 
Egyptologist can speak with patience of Mr Forster's 
book. 

Our faith is always in degrees. We believe in Alfred 
more than in Arthur, — more in the Gracchi than in 



152 ON THE EAELT [lECT. 

Romulus and Remus. Time and distance have great 
dominion over historic faith. Alexander is to us a real 
personage ; we believe in Socrates not quite so clearly, but 
yet more confidently than in Lycurgus ; in Lycurgus more 
than in Cadmus ; in Cadmus more than in Hercules ; and 
not at all in Jupiter and Semele. But time is but a single 
element in the constitution of the credence that we give to 
past events_, and hot at all the most important one ; other- 
wise Ramses II. would not be to the mind of scholars of 
the present day as solid a reality as Csesar or Napoleon. 

Time goes for nothing when we have contemporary docu- 
ments. These are the legitimate masters of our faith. In 
their absence there must always be more or less of anai'chy 
in history, more or less doubt mixed with our faith. 
Ramses as Sesostris, that is^ before his monuments were 
discovered, was the fanciful hero of a Greek fable — quite 
on a par with Hercules. The traveller who deciphers 
Bonivard^s signature on the stone column to which he was 
chained in the Chateau of Chillon, — or the half-finished 
couplet of Byron at the top of the Giralda of Seville, — who 
stands alone in the desert of Murgab, before the marble 
fragment which bears the winged relief of the old Persian 
king and reads the words : ' 1 am Cyrus the king, the 
Achsemenian,^ — or who catches a glimpse of some noble 
record in the valley of the Nile, such as that of the an- 
cient governor of Lycopolis : ' Never have I taken the child 
from the mother^s breast, nor the poor man from the side 
of his wife,^ — he feels the full meaning of the term contem- 
porary testimony hy means of monuments. 

But there is a third element of history which regulates 
the other two, and by which we criticise and limit the 
value of contemporary monuments, — it is the vraisemhlable. 
A tale told by the mountain (tel) itself cannot be believed 
unless it represents events as flowing in that self-same cur- 
rent of the comm,onplace in which our lives flow on. The es- 
sential sameness of the manners and customs of mankind — 
the long-enduring unchangeableness of the social life of 
man — the steadfastness of man^s relationships to nature — 
must not be violated, or we cannot believe. Even when 
Sesostris was a myth like Hercules there was this differ- 
■ence : the story of Sesostris was extraordinary but proba- 
ble were there but records left : but that of Hercules 



VI.] SOCIAL LIFE OF MAN. 153 

"would be incredible however many monuments were left. 

Now, judging the Mosaic story by these canons, in which 
all agree, we find it of an age far antedating all precise 
histoiy, — we find it utterly unsupported by contemporary 
monumental records, — and we feel it to be a splendid series 
of incredibilities from first to last. His birth, his miracles, 
his exodus, his converse with Jehovah, and his mysterious 
disappearance, — all stamp the history with an indeHble 
character of myth which not a single discovery of any 
branch of science has yet repaid the endeavour to efface. 

In less degree — in a far less degree — but still in essen- 
tially the same mode the legends of the Jews of a date 
previous to the reign of Solomon are utterly unhistorical, 
although the stories of the Judges are probable enough. 
Nothing prevents us from identifying the Hebrews of the 
m.onarchy as descendants of the Hyksos race, nor from 
supposing that the Mosaic records were inventions of a 
later age, based on a mixture of Hyksos traditions, Arabian 
poetry, Zoroastrian mythology and genuine Egyptian and 
Assyrian monumental history. Nothing prevents us from 
concluding that the Egyptian inscriptions record merely a 
local and temporary eddy through the isthmus of Suez of 
that master flood of migration which, starting from the 
centres of Arianism about the Hindu Koosh in Afghan- 
istan, and allying itself originally with the movements of 
the Children of the Sun and the Children of the Moon in 
north-western India, spread itself over Palestine and 
Syria and Arabia, and then through the dispersion of the 
Jews into all the countries of the modern world ; a migra- 
tion which, as I have said, is the most important of all that 
have occurred since man was placed by his Creator on the 
earth. 

But in an anthropological sense the history of the He- 
brews is of far inferior importance when compared with that 
of the early Egyptians, for of this last we have a world of 
contemporary documents and therefore the most precise 
information. It is to the earliest monuments of Egypt 
that we must turn for pictures of the social state of a 
race of men standing in the boldest contrast with all thai 
we know by inference from the relics of the diluvium and 
the cave deposits and the palafittes of the social state of 
far more ancient and more savage races, living under less 



154 



ON THE EARLY 



[lect. 



CHART OF EGYPTIAN HISTOEY. 



Ancient Empire : 
Thinis Dynasty I. 
Thinis II. 

Memphis 
Memphis 
Memphis 
Elephantine 
Memphis 
Memphis 
Heliopolis 
Heliopolis 




Cheops. 



lasted 1940 years (? Manetho.) 
Menes."! Pyramid of Cochome. 

)- Monuments rare. 769 years. 

Pyramids. Mt Sinai (Wady Magara). 
Tombs at Saqqara. 
Nitocris ; Apappus. 

fM onuments wanting. 436 years. 
I Egypt perhaps overrun by foreigners. 
I The end of the old writing, religion, 
L civil service, &c. 



Middle Empire : lasted 1361 years (? Manetho). 

Thebes XT. Entef, Mentouhotep. ) 

Thebes XII. Osortasen, Amenemha. j Beni Hassan. Lake Moeris. 

Thebes XIII. Nofrehotep, Sebekhotep. 60 kings, 463 years. 

Xosi XIV. Nothing known of tliis. At its close commenced 

Entef XV. invasions of the Hyksos, lasting 400 years ; 

Entef XVI. ended with the establishment of the Hyksos. 

San XVII. Saites (Htksos). Colossi. Sphinxes. 



Classic Empire. 



Thebes 



XVIII. 



Thebes XIX. 

Thebes XX. 

Thebes; San. XXI. 
Tell-basta XXII. 

San XXIII. 



Sais 
Sais 



XXIV. 

XXV. 

XXVI. 



Amosis (Ahmes). Amenophis. Thoutmes. Qiieei 
Hatasou. Thebes illustrated. Asia conquered 
Sun worship introduced by Khou-en-aten. 

Ramses I. Seti. Sesostris (Pentaour). Menephtha 

Ramses III. (Sea fight.) Asiatic influences. 

Priest dynasty at Thebes. Manetho's kings at San. 

Sheshonk (takes Jerusalem). Egypt a part of Asia. 

Twelve barons divide Lower Egypt. Upper Egypt 
becomes a province of Soudan. 

Bocchoris, reigning six years, the only king. 

Sabacon(Cush) conquers Egypt. 50 years. Tahraka. 

Psamraiticus, the Libyan ? Greek mercenaries. 
Periplus of Africa. Canal of Suez reattempted. 



Persiaii, Greek, and Roman Empires. 

XXVII. Cambyses. Darius. 121 years. 
Sais XXVIII. Wars 'with the Persians. 

Mendes XXIX. Wars with the Persians. 

Sebennytes XXX. Nectanebo I. Last king expelled by the Persians 

XXXI. Darius III. Six years. 
Alexandria XXXII, Alexander I., II. 

Alexandria XXXIII. Ptolemies, Cleopatra, Berenice, Arsinoe. 
Alexandria XXXIV. Roman proconsuls. 



VI.] SOCIAL LIFE 01? MAN. 155 

favourable auspices for health of body_, peace of mindj and 
growth in human culture. This picture I will now endea- 
vour to place before your eyes. 

But to make the matter as plain as possible I must put 
it in a graphical form and show by a chronological chart 
the true relationship in point of time between the Hyksos 
episode and the beginnings of Egyptian civilization. This 
chart will show the four great empires of Egyptj beginning 
with that of the Pyramids and ancient tombs of Memphis^ 
5000 years B.C. And you will notice at a glance that the 
17th dynasty _, that of the Hyksos^ comes midway in the 
column between the time of that ancient empire with its 
oldest of earthly monuments and our own day. Perhaps 
3300 years preceded the fall of the Hyksos dynasty^ and 
3500 years have succeeded it. 

Such has been the history of Egypt. Seven thousand 
years have passed since the fourth king of the first dynasty 
built the first pyramid of Cochome, the first which greets 
the traveller going forth into the desert from the gates of 
Cairo.* Tetj even then, Egypt was an old country; its 
people civilized ; its architecture grand in idea and perfect 
in execution ; its statuary as natural as any group of 
E/Ogers^ statuettes; its language not only formed but re- 
duced to writing ; its agricultural life rich with oxen, asses, 
dogs and monkeys, antelopes and gazelles, geese, ducks 
and swans and slaves of Numidia. But the horse and the 
camel of Arabia were wanting ; they knew nothing either 
of the elephant or the giraffe of Africa ; the sheep of Eu- 
rope and the poultry of China are nowhere to be seen ; nor 
had the house cat yet assumed her witch-role on the hearth. 

* In his paper on the Antiquity of Man, read before the last meeting 
of the Ethnological Section of the British Association, meeting at Dnndee, 
August, 1867, Mr Crawfurd, who is a believer in the multiple origin of 
our race, adopts ChampoUeon's date for the beginning of Egyptian history, 
9000 years before Christ, and argues for an immensely older history, upon 
the ground that language, civilization, letters, arts, agriculture, and the 
domestication of animals are slow processes. Too much stress, however, 
must not be laid upon this consideration, for when genius speaks the times 
obey and hasten to realize its propositions, and to fulfil its prophecies. 
Sir J. Lubbock, although an advocate of the unity of origin, agreed with 
him upon the point of the antiquity of Egyptian civilization, and the 
necessity for previous ages of emergence from the savage life of the cave- 
dwellers. 



156 ON THE EARLY [lECT. 

But tkese people at the beginning of written history had 
no ships for commerce, and could not have introduced 
what existed around the shores of the Mediterranean^ or 
along the Indian Ocean. But what did then exist ? The 
rest of mankind seem to have been savages^ without cats 
also. Probably neither the horsB;, nor camel^ nor elephant, 
nor sheep;, nor pheasant had yet been tamed, at all events 
not within reasonable reach of these rich farmers of the 
Nile. That they enjoyed a happy, peaceful, and sometimes 
a jolly life is easy to see, for the walls of the Memphite 
tombs are covered with pictures of feasts, and games, and 
dances, and boat tournaments, such as amuse the populace 
of Paris in July ; there you see poets chanting verses, and 
dancing girls with hair tressed up with plates of gold. 
But you may look around in vain for the symbols of any 
kind of warfare. Not a trace of military life is visible on 
any monument previous to the 12th dynasty : and veiy 
little trace of religion. How the dynasties were founded, 
or how they were overthrown, or changed, we cannot 
learn ; nor how the priests, if any then existed, turned an 
honest penny. The deity had neither name nor image. 
Osiris was unknown. The dog Anubis is the only guardian 
of these primeval mansions of the dead, the first deity as 
the first friend of man. We can make out only the signs 
of a purely patriarchal civilization in a land of peace and 
plenty. Each tomb is built by each farmer for his eternal 
residence. His efiigy is seen in it, surrounded by the 
pictures of his wife, his children, his servants, his scribes, 
his dogs and green monkeys and his household goods. 
And all thi^ 3000 years before Solomon built his temple on 
Mount Moriah, or the Assyrian his palace on the platform 
of Koujunjik. 

We may speculate upon the assertion that the Egyptians 
of the delta of the Nile sailed up the Adriatic and settled 
the delta of the Po, then crossed the Alps and descended 
to settle anew upon the delta of the Rhine, from whence 
they seized on all the smaller deltas of the British islands. 
We have nothing but fancy to guide us in determining 
how far the older civilization of the Egyptians modified the 
influence of the great emigrant race — the Phoenician — in 
forming the civilization of Europe. We have no sufficient 
demonstration of any such influence radiating from ancient 



VI. SOCIAL LIFE OP MAN. 157 

Egypt^ except in matters of religion, and tlirougli the in- 
termediation of other races, of wliicli more hereafter. For 
the present let me leave impressed upon your imagina- 
tions one clear image — the contrast, the marvellous con- 
trast between the two pictures I have drawn. On the 
one hand we have this picture of peace and plenty among 
the ancient landholders of the valley of the Nile. On the 
other hand we have that picture of want and warfare 
dominating the life of the wretched savages in the pine- 
woods of Scandinavia, and standing for the condition of 
the human race or rather of all the other human races 
existing at that ancient epoch outside of the valley of the 
Sphinx. 

Yet such a contrast still exists in all its grim integrity 
upon the earth. Compare the palaces and parks of Eng- 
land and New England with the wigwams of the west or 
the negro cabins of the south; with the utter homelessness 
of the Hottentot and Australian in the one hemisphere, or 
the wretched reflection of primeval barbarism among '•'■les 
m.isera'bles'''' in Paris or in London. And so the world 
hoards up its old letters, although they can only be re-read 
with shudderings and tears. 



LECTURE VII. 

ON LANGUAGE AS A TEST OF RACE. 

The subject of the language of man will engross our 
attention tliis evening. 

Those wlio believed jn tte origin of all the human races 
from a single pair found the question of the probable lan- 
guage spoken by that pair and their immediate descendants 
considerably simplified. The fathers of the Church took 
for granted that the language of the oldest writings which 
the Church acc-epted as sacred and divine was the language 
in which Adam and Eve addressed each other in Paradise. 
When the critics of a later age began to find reasons for 
believing that the Mosaic records had been compiled from 
the most worthy scraps of the most ancient written tradi- 
tions^ it only strengthened the claims of the Hebrew to be 
the language of the antediluvian patriarchs. 

But when the science of comparative philology was dis- 
covered the special students of certain special languages^ 
in their enthusiastic devotion to their special studies^ 
began to put in other claims for this high honour and to 
dispute the pre-eminence of the Hebrew^ contending that it 
must have suffered so many changes no one could tell what 
it had been in the beginning. 

A s the learned world woke up to an appreciation of the 
beautiful structure and great antiquity of the Sanscrit 
many were disposed to consider tJiat sacred language of 
southern Asia the mother language of mankind. 

Then came the Egyptologists with their monumental 
letters and improved chronology^ antedating that of the 
Hebrews by several thousands of years. They proved that 
the Coptic language, although allied to the Hebrew, was in 
fact the language of the Pharaohs before Abram had come 



ON LANGUAGE AS A TEST OP RACE. 159 

out of Ur of the Chaldees. Coptic must therefore have 
been the speech of Paradise. 

There were some to demand for the Armenian language 
the credit of being the oldest in the world. And there have 
been most learned Welshmen to parade the fact that their 
British mother tongue could afford a reasonable etymology 
for every one of its own words in proof that it alone could 
be the aboriginal speech of the world. 

But the progress of the science of comparative philology 
has extinguished one by one, all these absurd pretensions 
even without the necessity of a reference to the goodness 
of the foundation on which they rested^ viz. the truth of 
the legend of a Paradise and a first human pair. 

But although the science of comparative philology has 
been able to extinguish the claims set up by each individual 
language to be that which the earliest people on the earth 
spoke^ it has not been able^ on the other hand^ to point 
out what was the original language. We are just as far 
removed to-day from knowing that as we ever were. 

Comparative philology is one of the most beautiful and 
attractive of all the modern sciences. It is fresh and 
vigorous. It has an immense coterie of disciples and many 
masters. It has conquered a large territory and set up a 
splendid throne. It makes advances every year. It has 
established laws which are unshakable. It is a world of 
truth ; no one doubts it. It is^ in some respects, fully the 
equal of the other sciences. But in saying thus much we 
have said all we dare to say. 

In other and very important respects, the science of com- 
parative philology is young and raw, undisciphned and 
disorganized ; or rather, rising as it has like a Phoenix 
from the ashes of its predecessor out of the cinders of what 
was known in the middle ages as the science of Language, 
it still retains, involved in its constitution, quantities of 
that unorganized magma all the elements of which it is 
bound some day to reduce to perfect order. In this 
respect it is far behind the so-called physical and natural 
history sciences. Some of its most important principles 
have yet to be settled. Some of its grandest questions 
have hardly been announced. Its doctors still pursue the 
most opposite methods. Its books are not only full of 
irreconcilable contradictions; they do not yet state any 



160 ON LANGUAGE. [lECT. 

grand body of universally accepted facts out of which fresh 
investigations can deduce acceptable generalizations. 

The true principle for a correct classification of the lan- 
guages for instance has not yet been established. Philo- 
logists have indeed worked out a number of fine groups, 
and settled to some extent their boundaries. They can 
talk to you about the Indo- Germanic family^ and show you 
how it is broadly distinguished from the Shemitic family 
on the one side^ and from the Tartar family on the other. 
They can separate the Teutonic languages from the Celtic 
and classic groups on the one side, and from the Slavonic 
group on the other. They can distinguish the southern 
or Teutonic from the northern Gothic or Scandinavian 
sub-families. They can designate seven or eight chief 
subdivisions of a single language like the French. They 
can go much farther even than that, and count up its patois 
or local variations until they reach an incredible number.* 
And all this amounts to something certainly. It repre- 
sents a vast amount of hard work. JBut it does not repre- 
sent as yet a law of classification. There is no established 
and accepted classification of the four or five thousand lan- 
guages of the earth. There is even the greatest difference 
of opinion among philologists as to the true principles 
upon which we are to decide whether a language actually 
belongs and why it must be considered as belonging to 
one group rather than to another. Some base the classifi- 
cation upon the grammar : others upon the dictionary. 
The science of comparative philology is now in the same 
state in which comparative zoology was before the days of 
Cuvier when the bats were classed among the birds 
because they lived by flying in the air; and cetaceans, 
whales, seals, walruses, &c. with fishes although they 
breathed the air and suckled their young; and lemurs 
with squirrels instead of with the monkeys where they 
actually belong. 

And, in fact, we may as well say at the outset that all the 
great questions which have come up for settlement in the 
other older and maturer sciences come up again in some 
analogous form for settlement in this young raw science of 

* See the variations on the words 'deux fils'in the Transactions of the 
Antiquarian Society of France (C. 9. 13). 



VII.] AS A TEST OF EACE. 161 

comparative philology. And how indeed could it happen 
otherwise? For the things which we call words are 
organic things like animals and vegetables. They have 
roots and branches. They grow and decay. They have 
fixed laws to govern their existence^ like all other beings. 
They do not leap from our mouths helter-skelter^ as the 
toads and jewels dropped from the mouths of the daughters 
of the cruel stepmother in the fairy tale. They are not 
accidentally created. We are not their voluntary creators. 
They breed in us and issue from us^ not only from our lips 
but from our brains, by laws as regular and permanent as 
those which govern the conception and birth of broods of 
fishes, birds or serpents. Language therefore must be a 
department of natural history. New expressions or idioms 
appear upon the face of human society just as new species 
and varieties of animals and vegetables have successively 
made their appearance upon the surface of the earth and 
in the waters of the sea. And words and languages perish 
and are preserved in the history of literature precisely like 
those fossil forms of extinct plants and animals which we 
study in the geological deposits of the past. 

With the great fundamental principles of natural history 
therefore which we have had before us already more than 
once during the course of these lectures we have again 
to deal to-night. Philology finds the same lions in 
its path to the House Beautiful which have frightened 
the other sciences that have preceded it in pilgrimage. 

In the first place, there is the great possibility of spon- 
taneous production, or equivocal generation as the natur- 
alists call it. Mr Orosse took certain mineral matter, 
boxed it up carefully so as to exclude the air, heated it so 
as to destroy all germs of previous life . and sent for many 
weeks a perpetual current of galvanism through it so as 
to arouse the dormant powers of organic life. The result 
was, as he declares, that living insects made their appearance 
in great numbers. But the rest of the world doubts the 
fact ; a few only believe. Now what say philologists as to 
the possibility of a similarly spontaneous origin of a word 
out of the raw stuff" of thought ? Some affirm that new 
words are continually appearing in all languages like Mr 
Cresset's acari. Others, on the contrary, stand by the old 
doctrine that like breeds like and that all living forms 



162 ON LANGUAGE [lEOT, 

must come from germs or living cells wMcli are already 
organized nuclei of vital forces, or rather, in the language 
of the schoolmen, vital forms, formce formantes. Such 
philologists affirm therefore the necessary previous exist- 
ence of linguistic roots, and believe that all words must be 
developed out of roots ; that the great business of phi- 
lologists is to investigate roots in languages, to restrict the 
number of these roots in any language to the smallest 
quantity, and to compare the roots of different languages 
together so as to obtain a true classification. A school of 
oolo gists exists therefore as really in the science of com- 
parative philology, as in that of comparative zoology. 

But when you come to consider these roots or germs of 
words you find nothing in the shape of a settled principle. 
Some philologists consider all the roots of words as originally 
verbal, such as : to be, to go, to strike, to cut, to breathe. 
Others restrict this verbal character to a, few roots, and call all 
the rest nouns out of which verbs have been made. Some 
consider the root of a word reached when it is reduced to 
three letters ; others despise roots which consist of more 
than two letters. But nothing tells more plainly against 
the existence of any well-made-out law than the different 
number of roots to which different philologues reduce a 
given language. The Sanscrit for instance is said to have 
500 or 600 roots. But Kraitsir, before he died, had re- 
duced the number, in his own opinion, to a little over 200. 
Haldeman thinks no language can show more than 300. 

But the great question is about the spontaneous gener- 
ation of these germs, or roots. Then, at what age in the 
history of man did they appear ? Were there a certain 
number of aboriginal roots spoken by the tertiary, post- 
tertiary, or stone-age men ? or have word-roots been 
making their appearance all down through history, one 
at a time, or in groups, sufficiently numerous- to institute 
new branches of language, or new languages ? Then again, 
by what law of life did the roots of words get created at 
first ? or by what law do they continue to get created ? 
And if there be such a law of life for these word-roots 
does it include in itself a law of permanence, and a law of 
universality, i. e. does it secure the creation of a given 
root-word in all languages ; and then, does it secure the 
continued existence of that root-word to the end of time ? 



VII.] AS A TEST OF EACE. 163 

Or^ on the contrary, is there a law of change, by wMcli no 
original root-word has been able to maintain its integrity, 
but has fallen from its first estate and become depraved ? 
or, to state in other words this last question, do we find 
raging in this science of comparative philology the same 
warfare respecting ' a law of development ' by which one 
word-form -species gradually changes to another, and so 
one language to another, by old roots dying out and new 
roots striking in to the common soil ? 

Let me take up two or three only of these questions^, and 
state what I think is wanting to the science of philology 
to place it on a footing to do something for us in our in- 
vestigations into the early history of the human races and 
their migrations. For, at present, in spite of the high 
pretensions of its disciples, I do not think that we get any 
ethnological light from Philology worth speaking of ; hut, 
on the contrary, I think that in the position which the 
science occupies it casts a deep shadow of obscurit}- upon 
the whole subject of the human races. Whatever else 
therefore I must hurry over or omit to-night for want of 
time, or to avoid confusing your attention, this one thing 
I wish to make clear, my reasons for believing that the 
method of philologists must be amended and to a great 
extent re-modelled before we can get rid of some of the 
grossest errors in ethnology or really obtain a complete 
view of the relations which the human races hold to one 
another and to the present state of things. 

The origin of language may be regarded either, 1. as a 
supernatural revelation of a language already perfect to 
the first human beings; or, 2. as a power of language given 
to the first human beings in addition to all their other pe- 
culiar faculties as human beings ; or_, 3. as merely a superior 
human development of a general power of language (or 
faculty of expression) possessed by the whole animal world, 
inherent in fact in the constitution of all animated beings 
as well as man. 

The first of these modes of conceiving the possible origin 
of language as a divine revelation was almost universally 
adopted by heathen philosophers and Christian theologians 
to a very recent date, and is still indulged by those who 
believe in Adam and Eve in Paradise. Although the most 
natural way of understanding the old legend that Jehovah 



164 ON LANGUAGE [lECT. 

brought to Adam all the birds and beasts and creeping 
tilings that he might give to each of them its name would be 
to suppose existing in Adam's mental constitution a myste- 
rious faculty of representing what he saw and knew by 
audible sounds intelligible to his wife and children. 
Science, however, can take no note of the supernatural 
unless it becomes natural and takes the oath of allegiance 
to nature. Nature itself is too supernatural to require any 
additions from the realms of human ignorance. And 
moreover, if there were more aboriginal human races than 
one there would be needed as many repetitions of the 
same revelation of language ; unless to each race a different 
language were revealed ; in which case the confusion of 
tongues at the building of the Tower of Babel would have 
been anticipated. 

The second and third modes of conceiving of the origin 
of language are the modes now adopted by men of science. 
And they only differ in degree according to our views of 
the relative dignity of man and the brutes. All philolo- 
gists are more or less disposed to place among the natural 
attributes of man a faculty for expressing himself and ex- 
pressing the outside world also in appropriate words. 

Some go farther and say, that this faculty for vocal 
utterance of mental feeling is common to man with the 
brutes; that the brutes are not brutes, i. e. mutes; that the 
animals all have parts of speech ; and that man has the 
faculty of speech only and simply because he is one of the 
animals. His faculty is larger and finer than theirs be- 
cause his brain is larger and finer than theirs ; because his 
mental, moral, and spiritual nature is more angelic; because 
his senses deal with a larger world and his tastes are 
refined by civilization. But, however his poetry may soar, 
and his eloquence burn, and his prayers go up as accept- 
able incense before Him that sitteth upon the throne, and 
before the Lamb, these glorious phenomena of thought 
made flesh in language are as closely and eternally related 
to the bleating of the flocks and the warbling of birds as 
the infinite scope and sweep of solar systems in the heavenly 
spaces are closely and eternally related to the spiral flight 
of a bee when the hunter liberates it from his box in a 
dingle of the forest to guide him on to rob its hive. 

It makes no difference to the main question of the origin 



▼II.] AS A TEST OF RACE. 165 

of language whether man takes the animals into partner- 
ship or not, provided he considers his faculty of language 
constitutional. 

But now we approach the difficulties. How is human 
language constitutional ? 

It may be asked in reply : How is taste constitutional ? 
How is conscience constitutional ? How is any one of the 
bodily senses constitutional ? The schoolmen have an- 
swered this as they have answered the other question, by 
saying that conscience is a gift from God. Religious peo- 
ple get over a similar difficulty by preaching and praying 
for a change of heart. The old philosophers went farther 
and very logically, when they made Taste a supernatural 
revelation ; and we retain a fragment of their superstition 
in our popular use of their word Genius^ by which they 
understood a veritable divine possession, analogous (but 
opposite) to diabolical possession. But no one has gone 
so far as to make our bodily senses supernatural. We let 
the physiologists alone and wait patiently for their newest 
and best descriptions of how these faculties are constitu- 
tional. In like manner we read Paley and Locke, and 
Kant and Comte and Sir William Hamilton, and Mill and 
Spencer and all the rest of the psychologists, to get the 
latest and clearest and most consistent views of the con- 
stitutionality of our higher powers, taste or the faculty of 
liking, conscience or the faculty of judging, worship or 
the faculty of serving. Why, then, should we not hear 
Schlegel and William von Humboldt and Max Miiller 
describe the latest and best modes of conceiving how lan- 
guage, or the faculty of self-utterance, enters as a har- 
monious part into the human constitution ? 

I aaj' modes and not mode of conceiving, because these 
highest philologists are not agreed. There are four 
theories of the way in which a constitutional tendency to 
language in man may work itself out and produce words, 
or if you please roots, or germs of words. 

Without asking you to take my names as perfectly de- 
scriptive of these four methods, but only as sufficiently 
suggestive to make my descriptions plain, I will call 
these four ways : — 

1. The method by imitation. 

2. The method by interjection. 



166 ON LANGUAGE [lECT. 

8. The method by sympathy. 

4. The method by invention. 

The first theory of the formation of words^ by imitation, 
supposes that men were originally children or if you please 
monkeys with superior vocal organs capable of reproducing 
all the sounds of nature which fell upon the ear ; and that 
they necessarily called the dog ' bow/ and the cow ' moo/ 
and the sheep ' baa/ before they could discover their pro- 
perties and invent other and higher names. You are 
aware that the ancient gramm.arians termed the whole 
class of such imitations ' onomatopoeic ' words^ and that 
this term is still in constant use. Our boys are taught at 
school that such words as hiss, rattle, clatter, splash, and 
many others, are natural attempts to make language out of 
the noises of nature. And it is no doubt so. All lan- 
guages have this kind of words. Everybody betakes him- 
self to imitation when he hears a new sound in nature 
which has not before been named.* But^ on the other 
handj it is curious to see how little resemblance exists be- 
tween the names of a natural sound in different languages. 
It is as if the ears of difierent races heard these sounds 
differently. To understand why^ let any one listen to 
some inarticulate sound — for example^ the roar of a bull — 
and observe how circumstances alter its character^ — how 
it is one thing when near^ and another when far away^ — 
how one might think at this moment that it sounded like 
loio, at that moment like Jco, at another like m.oo, at a 
fourth as if it had no consonantal beginning, at a fifth as if 
it had a consonantal ending, &c. It is impossible that all 
human language should have arisen from so meagre and so 
indefinite a stock of primary imitations of natural noises. 
To say nothing of the necessary expression of purely 
mental creations — the intransitive verbs to be and to hare, 
for instances — and a hundred other equally aboriginal and 
indispensable words in every language, for which no sound 
in nature ever could have stood as model. 

The second theory, that of interjection, provides for the 

* I have a little cousin three years old who began to call a pencil re^ 
(rech), and has continued to do so ever since. I know of no other origin 
for this word than an attempt to imitate the harsh scratch of a slate 
pencil on a slate, although his parents are not aware that it had such an 
origin. 



VII.] AS A TEST OF RACE. 167 

difficulties whicli are raised in the way of accepting the 
theory of imitation. It is supposed by many that the 
rational soul of man struggled into speech as the Chris- 
tian enters the kingdom of heaven, by violence. That at 
first the communication of man with nature and with his 
fellow man was like, that of the animals, and like that of 
idiots, by cries and yells_, by groanings and sighings, by 
rude attempts at varied musical notes, by hissings and 
mutterings and murmurs, gradually getting modulations 
of their own and falling into series under the government 
of the memory and the judgment as these became culti- 
vated by exercise. Certainly there are interjections in all 
languages, ohs ! and ahs ! for wonder and admiration and 
complaint. But when we compare the interjections of 
different languages, we soon perceive that there exist but 
half-a-dozen which can be called universal, or could serve 
as a starting-point for language. The moment this narrow 
charmed circle is past all uniformity ceases and some 
other law of word-making must be supposed to interfere. 
What resemblance, for instance, can be traced between the 
English interjection alas ! and its German synonym 
leider', The English wo ! is the same as the Latin vae I 
(pronounced wai), but the French helas I has not the least 
likeness to the Pennsylvania-Dutch autsch I If there be 
an interjectional common language for mankind then it 
must be so beclouded by differences in the vocal organs, 
in the passions, and in the mental experiences of the differ- 
ent races, and its root-words must have suffered so much 
change, that all attempts to use it as a guide. in ethnology 
must prove futile. At the same time, the interjectional 
efforts of the soul in the direction of language cannot be 
lost sight of in attempting to explain some of the mys- 
teries and curiosities of literature, as I will have occasion 
hereafter to show. And Dr Kraitsir was perhaps nearer 
the truth than many of us imagine, when he taught that 
the native interjections of the voice went forth from the 
mouth under the influence of a genuine entente cordialc 
or permanent good understanding between, first, the 
body of man and his mind, and secondly, between the 
mind and surrounding nature. 

For the third theory of language, then, I use the term 
symjoathy. Dr Kraitsir's interpretation of it is only one 



168 ON LANGUAGE [lBCT, 

of several. Other philologists describe it and illustrate it 
in somewhat different ways, but they all come to the 
same thing in the end. Now the nature of this sympa- 
thetic relationship existing between man and nature is 
perfectly mysterious, and we may well be prepared for 
complete mysteries in its vocal manifestations. The first 
formation of language must be a great mystery on any 
theory. But it is a phenomenon no stranger than the 
newborn child's knowing how to suck. When I give you 
one or two illustrations of Dr Kraitsir's views, then you 
will remember how deep into nature these magic influences 
penetrate ; and how the automatic adjustment of the 
crystalline lens of the eye to objects of sight according to 
their distance from us is as inexplicable an act of the 
brain as any automatic adjustment of the tracheae to the 
objects of conversation. 

To see then how an act could be expressed in a word, 
let us take for an example the act of going out. What is 
the going to be referred to ? Dr Kraitsir answered : to 
the breath J and what the out ? Answer : to the mouth. If 
now we can make the breath perceptible to the ear, first 
while still within the mouth, and then after it has issued 
from the mouth, and if we can give our auditor a clear idea 
of these two things m connection, we shall have expressed 
' going out.' Let us then first make a noise in our throat, 
i. e. pronounce the guttural k ; then let us make a noise of 
wind issuing from our lips, or rather issuing from between 
the tongue and the teeth, i. e. pronounce the sibilant s. 
The word for going out will then be simply the two letters 
h-s, pronounced together, Tis. This is the actual Latin 
word ex, out of. 

If you wish a more complicated instance, I will give you 
Kraitsir's favourite example, which always made me smile 
I confess, but which furnishes a very perfect example of 
the mode in which this theory of the sympathetic formation 
of language applies its principles. 

How can we imagine that the human mind would act 
upon the larynx and mouth so as to give an outsider the 
idea of abstract solidity, matter, body ? A body is matter 
in three dimensions, vertical, horizontal forwards, and 
horizontal sideways. Now the organs of speech consist 
chiefly of the throat, the tongue, and the lips ; the first is 



Til.] AS A TEST OF EACE. 169 

vertical, tlie second horizontal forwards, and the tliird 
horizontal sideways. If we take, therefore, a guttural, a 
lingual, and a labial, we can with these three sound the 
three dimensions of matter, i. e. express the idea of a body- 
in the general. Thus: — K'R'P, corpus, the Latin word for 
body. From this word can now be formed nouns, verbs, 
adjectives, adverbs, &c., expressing modifications of this 
idea of solid body, ad libitum ; such as grip, grab, grave, 
eiigrave, &c. 

The difl&cuity in the way of accepting such a system of 
etymology is exactly the objection we feel to letting 
children drive a fast horse — it will run away with them 
and smash everything to flinders. All the most accom- 
plished philologists of our day, all the patient and success- 
ful investigators into the historical etymologies of words — 
beginnin g with Jacob Grimm, the father of the modern science 
of comparative philology, and including such men as Bopp 
and Pott and Schott, and Kahlgren and Rochrig, Halde- 
man, Whitney, Max Miiller, Ernest Renan — set their faces 
dead against what they consider to be only a revival of the 
wild vagaries of the fanciful philologists of past times, 
from the old Cratylus of Greece to the new Cratylus of 
Oxford, the Evanses, the Pocockes, the Davises, the 
Cannes, and a host of other names, most erudite and in- 
genious people, but working on the old and false system 
of mere analogy, a system which we dare not now return 
to because it would be subversive Of all the laws of 
letter-variation and word- derivation which have got them- 
selves established and illustrated within the last thirty 
years as fully as any of the laws of physics or natural 
history. 

If you wish to see how the old system of etymologies is 
abhorred and repudiated by the masters of the new system 
of linguistic mutation and derivation, I would refer you to 
the second series of Max Miiller' s Lectures on Language. 
He is particularly severe upon the first two theories whioii 
I have enumerated — the method by imitation, which he 
calls the ' bow-wow theory,' and the method by interjec- 
tion, which he calls the *' pooh-pooh theory.' Speaking of 
the first or bow-wow theory he says, ' the onomatopoeic 
theory goes very smoothly as long as it deals with cackling 
hens and quacking ducks ; but round that poultry yard 



170 ON LANGUAGE [LBCT. 

there is a dead vvall^ and we soon find tliat it is behind that 
wall that language really begins/" 

To illustrate the ridiculous excess to which the second 
or pooh-pooh theory may be driven by its ignorant advo- 
cates he recites from the Honolulu newspaper, the Polyne- 
sian^ of 1862 J an etymology of the Hawaian word Hooiaioai, 
to testify, viz. from five roots hoo-o-ia-io-ai, meaning causa- 
tion, interjection, pronoun definite^ rapid and thorough 
movement resulting in realization and completion, — or in 
English words, mahe that completely out to he a fact, 
Hooiaioai ; testify to its truth. Nothing could well be more 
ridiculous. And yet our libraries are filled with old 
volumes on language containing literally myriads of etymo- 
logies as ridiculous and more ridiculous than that. 

To take another class of etymologies from the list of 
proper names of persons in the Hebrew Scriptures : when 
their compilers explain the change from Abram to Abra- 
ham by the announcement that he was to be the father of 
many nations because in the Hebrew of Solomon^s day ah, 
rah, and am were the three words for father, many and 
people without reference to the fact that his original con- 
nection was with central Asia and its languages, why should 
we accept their etymology ? How evidently has the story 
of Sarah^s laughter been inserted in the legend of Isaac's 
birth in order to support the etymology of his name from 
the Hebrew verb to laugh ! The explanation of the name of 
Moses : ' because he was drawn out of the water,' — are we 
to prefer it to that of the monumental Egyptian proper 
name mas, which means a child ? or must we seek still other 
fanciful resemblances to other Egyptian roots ? All such 
etymologies unsupported by well-known facts capable of 
comparative investigation it is a waste of time to quote, 
and a drawback if employed in the study of ancient history. 
The method is a false one — radically false. 

But let us not be frightened away from our dinner of 
honest mutton chops or noble roast beef because French 
cooks can deceive the traveller with ragouts of cat when 
he calls for hare. A Ouvier will eat his cat with great 
nonchalance, and hold up one of the bones to the landlord 
after dinner, remarking with a smile that his hare must 
have been a most singular specimen, having an anatomy 
analogous to the carnivores. 



VII.] AS A TEST OP EACE. 171 

Wlien a transcendental pliilologue constructs an etymo- 
logy for sucli a word as hersil, the Hebrew word for iron^ 
out of the Hebrew verb peres, to pierce or cut and a sup- 
posed determinative final letter I meaning through., the 
conclusion is as empirical and unscientific as fanciful and 
untrustworthy as when the ancient Talmudists derived 
hersil from the initial letters of the names of Jacobus four 
wives Bilhah, E-achel, Zilpah^, and Leah. But when a com- 
parative philologist^ obeying the canon of modern science 
that ' no scripture is of private interpretation/ takes up the 
study of all the names of iron in various languages, and 
as one of a whole group of metals, and perceives, first, that 
when reversed the Shemite name for iron is the Indo- 
Germanic name for another of the metals, silher ; and 
secondly, that its first syllable, her, is also represented 
by the Latin word for gold, aur, the German haar, the 
English bullion, the French hague (originally halg, a golden 
ring), and other similar analogues, — and that the second 
syllable, sil, has similar relationships with cesel, chalkos, 
&c., &c. j he is on the high road to some valuable result, 
which his investigations will be sure to reach if patiently 
and carefully pursued. 

The question is not what etymologists who are ignorant 
of or indifferent to Grimm^s laws of mutation have done 
with the roots of language ; but the question is, how did 
the roots or germs of language originate ? Miiller himself 
distinguishes between these questions. ' There is one class 
of scholars,^ he says, '' who derive all words from roots 
according to the strictest rules of comparative grammar, 
hnt who look upon the roots, in their original character, as 
either interjectional or onomatopoeic. There are others 
who derive words straight from interjections and the cries of 
animals, and who claim in their etymologies all the liberty 
the cow claims in saying mooJi, hooJi, or ooh, or that man 
claims in saying [.ooh, fi, jofui. With regard to the former 
theory, I should wish to remain entirely neutral.^ It is 
only the latter that he opposes. He does not pretend to 
say how much of the language of the first savages of the 
earth consisted of imitative cries and interjections ; but of 
this he is quite sure, that the historical languages of after 
times obey laws of mental growth and rational a,rrange- 



172 ON LANGUAGE [lECT. 

ment wliicli are our only guides tkrougli the forest of 
etymology. 

Professor Pott even denies that the root-words of lan- 
guages ever were words — spoken words. He thinks that 
they are mere abstractions obtained by our analysis of 
languages now spoken. He says_, if they existed at all in 
early ages they existed merely as dim, vague, floating, 
formless ideas in the savage brain, and came out in that 
ancient savage speech sometimes in one form sometimes 
in another, at the whim of the speaker or the promptings 
of the moment.* 

But Miiller cannot take so German a view of roots. He 
has imbibed in Oxford too much of the practical genius of 
the English. He leaves the ghosts of words behind him, 
with all the other ghost faith of his fatherland. He thinks 
the ancient roots of words were the first actual words in 
use ; but then, they were used without any grammatical 
definition. ' I think,^ says he, ' that there was a stage in 
the growth of language, in which that sharp distinction 
which we make between the different parts of speech had 
not yet been fixed, and when even that fundamental dis- 
tinction between subject and predicate on which all the 
parts of speech are based had not yet been realized in its 
fullness, and had not yet received a corresponding outward 
expression.''f He refers to languages at the present day in 
this germinal condition. In Chinese, for instance, ly means 
an ox, a plough, and the act of 'ploughing ; ta means great, 
greatness, and greatly. In Egyptian an'h meant life, living, 
lively, and to live.X Other languages are seen just coming 
out of this first stage into a second, where the root is 
retained, and another root is attached to it to show the 
mental distinctions. In the Polynesian dialects any verb 
may be used unchanged as a noun or adjective by adding 
kua or particles of affirmation, and ko or particles of the 
agent. § In our own English we speak in the same way; 
we say make, m^ake-r, make-ing. Miiller gives a still more 
striking illustration from the language of children, that 

* Etymolog. forschungen, ii. 95. in Miiller, p. 95. 
t Second Series of Lectures, p. 95. 
X Bunsen's Egypt, i. 824, in same. 
§ Hale, p. 263, in same. 



VII.] AS A TEST OP KACB. 173 

world of perennial savagery,, that fountain of antiquity 
welling up for ever at our feet. And let me here assure 
you that some of the finest laws of comparative language 
have been discovered by watching the speech of children. 
Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings He hath ordained 
praise. And he who thinks that he can settle the laws of 
morahty, or of reason^ or of language without the closest 
and most patient investigation of infants and young people 
will never become a master in any of the schools of the 
future, — of that he may rest well assured. 

What then is the process of forming word-roots in the 
mouth of children ? A child says ' up ! up ! ' meaning, ' I 
want to get up on my mother^ s lap.-* In his mind noun, 
verb, adjective are completely confounded and form an 
ideal unit. It will be months or years before he can 
separate the subjective I from the objective mother's lap, 
or the want from the action of getting up into it. 

But, after all, we do not get an idea of the origin of this 
word uj), which stands for so much. Our children take it 
from ourselves. We got it from our English ancestors ; 
they from their Saxon forbears. How far back it can be 
tr3,ced we do not know. We know of no sound in nature 
of which it could have been an imitation. We know of no 
explosion of feeling to produce such an interjection. It 
would be hard for Dr Kraitsir to devise a spiritual explana- 
tion of its sympathy with what it represents, whether as 
up, u-pward, or upon ; and if he could, the explanation would 
not stand good for its correspondences in other languages, 
such aa auf in German, su in Italian, or avoo in Greek.* 
And what is true of this word is true of all other unimita- 
tive and uninterjectional roots, the world round, and the 
ages through. 

Have we no explaiiation, then, for the origin of the great 
body of aboriginal root-words, and for the numerous pri- 
mary monosyllables which we use every day? I must re- 
peat what I said at the beginning of this lecture, that the 

* The sound of up {ab, pronounced ap) is employed by the Germans 
to express the very opposite sense of down. The French have no word 
at all corresponding to the English up, for their en haut is the English on 
high ; and their sus is never used but in composition. That curious ex- 
ample of ' polar meanings,' au dessus and au dessous, is repeated in a wholly 
different form in the German auf and ab. 



174 ON LANGUAGE [lBCT. 

science of language is in its infancy. But still we are not 
wliolly helpless. You remember tliat I enumerated four 
theories of the origin of words ; but I have described only 
three thus far : the method by interjection, the method by 
imitation, and the method by sympathy. Each of these 
methods is available for some words ; and the method by 
sympathy plays an important part in the construction of 
large sections of the historical languages, as I may perhaps 
make clear hereafter^ in discussing the formation of the 
alphabet. But I must now describe to you the fourth 
theory, or the method by invention. 

It is denied by many philologists that a new word is ever 
invented. If by this be meant out of the head, as we say, 
that is, without any reference to existing words and things, 
it may possibly be true, although I doubt it. But if it be 
meant that no new words have ever been deliberately con- 
structed and put into circulation by intelligent human be- 
ings, words which had no connection with the organic 
development of language, I think that all human experi- 
ence, certainly all literary history, proves the contrary. 
Nay, I think that I can show that the majority of the words 
now used by civilized people are inventions or modifications 
of purely invented words. Nay more — and this is the princi- 
pal thought which I wish this lecture to leave impressed 
upon your minds — there is a vast, a dominant element in 
language which I call the hardic element, because it con- 
sists of words invented by hards (poet-historians and poet- 
priests of old times), by druids if you like that title better — 
an element which has superseded and overgrown the more 
ancient and savage elements of language just as the oak 
forests of the Bronze age superseded the pine forests of 
the Stone age, and as the beech woods of the Iron age 
superseded the oak forests of the Bronze age — an element 
produced by the cultivation of the civilized intellect ; an 
element of religious, moral, and social terminology, which 
now forms the chief and almost the sole bond of communion 
between the various languages of the earth. And philolo- 
gists have so far ignored, despised, or overlooked this ele- 
ment as to throw, as I have said, a profound shadow over 
the early history of man, and a well-entertained suspicion 
upon the best conclusions not only of hnguistic ethnology 



VII.] AS A TEST OF RACE, 175 

but of their own science of comparative grammar itself.* 
I shall attempt nothing more this evening than to illus- 
trate these assertions, trusting to the incidental topics of 
the remaining lectures of my course for something like a 
reasonable demonstration. 

The great effort of linguistic science has been to prove 
that the present races of men came from one original race 
by showing how all languages now spoken by these races 
can be traced back to root-words which must be supposed 
to have formed one original language. I have already 
said how many difl&culties start up in the way of any such 
showing, and how little prepared our system of linguistic 
principles is for such an undertaking. But furthermore, 
language is the utterance of man^s spiritual nature. It 
must therefore be commensurate with that nature. It must 
vary as that nature varies. It must grow with its growth. 
We see the process of development of language parallel 
with the development of mind in every child. Every child 
drops the first language it has learned to speak and takes 
a new and better language suited to its advancing years. 
Again, the language of the boy is exchanged afterwards for 
the language of the man, when observation, reading and so- 
ciety have enlarged the mind still farther. f See how the 
turgid style of the poetic youth disappears before the solid 
matter-of-fact style of the man of business. See how the 
Johnsonian polysyllabic Latinism of five-and-twenty gives 
place to the nervous Saxon monosyllables of fifty. How 
smooth and fluent are Carlyle's first pages ! how harsh and 
unreadable his later books ! On the other hand, see Edmund 
Burke give up his chaste and simple early English for 
flowery and fantastic periods in his later years. All lan- 
guage is a daguerreotype of the soul. It is inconceivable 
that the men of the Bronze age, even if they were lineal 
descendants (which they probably were not) of the men of 

* Prof. Whitney, in his lectures on Linguistic Science delivered at the 
Smithsonian Institution, in March, 1864, says, ' It has quite recently been 
found that language is the principal means of ethnological investigation, 
of tracing out the deeds and fates of men during the pre-historic ages,' &c. 
All this ought to be true, but it is not yet true. 

t The boy swears in Basque, by Jingo ! {Jinco, Basque for God), and the 
man in Greek, by Jove ! 



176 ON LANGUAGE [lbCT« 

tlie Stone age could liave spoken the same language with 
that of their ancestors. Later civilizations must have in- 
stituted still different languages. All language is in a 
state of flux. Savage languages, as has been often asserted;, 
change rapidly from generation to generation. Our north- 
west Indians, we have been assured, could not comprehend 
their great grandfathers if now alive, and hardly their own 
grandfathers.* Nothing but writing down a language 
can save it from destruction. Nay, that will not do it. 
The Hebrew is gone ; the Sanscrit is gone ; the ancient 
Syriac is gone; the Babylonian, Assyrian, Egyptian are 
all gone ; and all we know of these mammoths of past mind 
we learn only from scattered fragments of them fossil- 
ized in parchment or in stone. Look at the changes which 
English has sustained since Magna Oharta was engrossed. 
Nothing but printing will save a language from decay. 
Stop the growth or prevent the change of mind and you 
can stop the growth and prevent the change of language. 
Printing does this in part. Printing fossilizes mind. The 
newspaper is an epidemic of paralysis. When 30,000,000 
of people wake up in the morning together, sit down to 
their breakfast at the same hour, call for 5,000,000 of copies 
of the same column of telegraphic despatch-news printed 
over-night, and one half of them make their remarks upon 
the news in the same democratic terms, and the other half 
in the same aristocratic terms, the good God has arrived 
at the end of his individual creations. Individuality is 
gone. One language at least is fixed. 

Now, if in all times this law of the growth and change 
of language in dependance upon the elevation of man's 
life out of savagery by civilization and of the development 
of his intellect by culture has been in action, how absurd 
is it for philologists to suppose that they can recover by 
the examination of either present grammars or present 
vocabularies the primeval languages of the Stone age; or 
determine the alliances of pre-historic tribes ; or trace the 
migrations and intermixtures of these tribes from one side 
to the other of the globe ! All those primeval languages 
are buried up deep underneath a mass of pre-historic lan- 

* This was positively denied, however, by one of the first missionaries 
of the Hudson Bay stations, who told me he formulated the northern 
languages, and found them rich and harmonious and almost invariable. 



VII.] AS A TEST OF EACE. 177 

guages, "whicli in tlieir turn liave been overlaid by the 
old historic tongues, which in their turn have been over- 
laid by the dialects now spoken. As well might the geo- 
logist expect to make out the lithology and structure of 
that inaccessible primeval crust which we must believe to 
exist beneath the Laurentian system the base of which we 
have never yet seen. As well might he expect to study 
the old Silurian and Devonian limestone, slate and sand 
deposits by analyzing the cretaceous and tertiary marls 
and clays which have succeeded and replaced them in the 
present surface. The philologist is even worse off than the 
geologist ; for there are no Laurentian or Huronian or 
Silurian mountains of language outcropping from and 
overhanging the more modern tide-water plains of literary 
history. The oldest language we have any chance to study 
is the Egyptian, a language of only 8000 years^ standing, 
and therefore in geological phrase a quaternary deposit be- 
longing to the present order of things, a language already 
civilized, full of the terms of home and farm life, capable 
of moral and religious expressions, and so nearly akin to 
English in its staple that I might have taken from it my 
illustration of the word 'wp,' a few minutes ago instead 
of from the English, for the Egyptian word was "^ ap ! ■* 

When Professor Whitney therefore — one of the best 
philologists of the new school now living, and an honour 
as he certainly is to the science of comparative grammar — - 
asserts, as he did in his Smithsonian lectures of last year, 
' that it has been recently found that language is the prin- 
cipal means of ethnological investigation, of tracing out the 
deeds and fates of men during the pre-historic ages,'' I 
demur emphatically to the allegation. I do not believe it. 
Unless hj pre-historic ages he means merely the ages which 
immediately preceded the opening of monumental and lite- 
rary history ; unless he is willing to exclude entirely from 
the discussion that immense, back-stretching line of ages 
during which the human races were unlettered, unhistoric, 
uncivilized and undevout, all record of which is lost beyond 
redemption by philology and only to be recovered as a 
part of the geological history of the earth and its inhabit- 
ants by the combined efforts of the geologists, the palae- 
ontologists, zoologists and archaeologists who have it 
entirely and justly in their charge. The philologists have 

12 



178 ON LANGUAGE [lECT. 

nothing whatever as yet to do witli it. Nor will they have 
until among the fossil remains of primeval men some trace 
of letters shall be discovered. If for instance, bones in 
some Poitou cave be really found scratched with Sanscrit 
letters, then let philologists step in and join the conclave. 
But even then language will not be^ as Professor Whitney 
says, '' the p incipal means of ethnological investigation.-' 

The great mistake made by the new school of linguistics 
is in supposing that there is no fourth theory of language; 
no fourth way in which words originated : viz. by actual 
invention ; no part of language which encrusts and conceals 
the organic structure. The fact is, mankind may be 
divided into two parts, like the body and its skin. Eich- 
ardson says that the characters in his splendid old novel of 
' Sir Charles Grandison ' are men, women, and Italians. 
History says that the characters in its drama of human life 
are men, women, and priests. Philologists of Professor 
Whitney^s school busy themselves entirely about the men 
and women^ but forget all about the priests. 

There is a langua,ge peculiar to every bird and beast. 
There was a language peculiar to every human race. 
There is a dialect characteristic of each village, township, 
city, province of each nation, of each tribe of men now 
living. These are great studies for the philologist. 
They can be separately analyzed, and they can be com- 
pared together. Their individual histories can be worked 
out to a certain distance back, as far as there are any 
literary records. They can be grouped, and to a certain 
extent^ — a very moderate extent — classified. They even 
afford stuflF for most ingenious and perfectly scientific and 
trustworthy conclusions, such as Grimm's laws of mutation 
and derivation. But they will not make of the philologist 
a trustworthy ethnologist. Why ? 

Because there is something else which he forgets to 
study, which he refuses to believe in. There is a language 
of priests. Because this language of priestcraft exists m 
among local dialects and national languages. Nay, be- 
cause it is so interfused with them as to form a component 
part of their constitution. Every language of modern 
times is stamped with this priest-language all over on the 
outside, is full of it inside, in its flesh and in the marrow 
of its bones. No anatomical preparation to be seen in a 



VII.] AS A TEST OF EACE. 179, 

museum is more completely streaked and analyzed to the 
eye by the red substance of injection than is the English, 
the French^ the Arabic^ the Hindu, the Zingali^, the Bur- 
mesCj the Japanese^ the Tasmanian injected and confused 
with a priestly language to the eye of the philologist who 
will consent to recognize its existence. 

What this priestly language is^ and how it seems to 
have originated, and why it is thus disseminated through 
all the various languages which are spoken by the various 
races of mankind, I shall endeavour to explain in my next 
two lectures on architecture and on the alphabet. But 
you will agree with me that if such an element can be 
proved to exist in various languages it must have the 
effect of greatly confusing and mystifying philologists who 
ignore its existence. And still more, if this element com- 
mon to many languages is in fact the principal or pre- 
dominant one of the elements which constitute their 
vocabularies, you can imagine how it must obliterate the 
original distinctions between languages and render the 
task of tracing the descent of races and their migrations 
previous to the introduction of this priestcraft almost if 
not entirely hopeless. 

Here I should properly end the lecture of this evening ; 
but a few words, before we part, on the classification of 
languages found in the books. The text books of philology 
distinguish languages as of three kinds: — 1. The mono- 
syllabic; 2. The agglutinate, and, 3. The inflected. 

The first kind are those which speak each word-root by 
itself, preceded and followed by other word-roots, each 
carrying its own idea in full, and leaving the hearer to find 
out the grammatical relation between them by his own 
wits, or by some accent or emphasis or musical modulation 
of the speaker^s voice. The specimen of this kind usually 
given is the Chinese. 

The second or agglutinate varieties of language combine 
the monosyllables which grammatically belong together 
into polysyllabic words, like the Saxon words for-bear, 
cart-horse, and into fixed grammatical idioms like to he, to 
do, to insist, according rinto, &c. And this process can be 
carried on to any extent. Words which have been com- 
pounded of three or four words can be contracted to 
monosyllables and then compounded anew, as an economi- 



180 ON LANGUAGE [lECT. 

cal family can live three days on a single round of beef by 
rebasbing it witb otber portions of tbeir meals from day 
to day. I may find occasion to illustrate tbis boiling-down 
and cooking-up process in language bereafter. Its phe- 
nomena are very curious and instructive. 

Tbe third class of languages^ the inflected^ are so called 
because their words are not served up pure and simple^ 
alone or in courses^ but garnished with prefixes and affixes^ 
which are as variable as Soyer^s recipes. The old gram- 
marians called these variations ' cases^' or fallings-ojff from 
the upright simplicity of the word-root; and they gave 
names to these cases^ nominative^ genitive^ dative, &c., for 
the purpose (apparently) of rendering it as difficult as pos- 
sible for the grammar-school boys of Boston to pass their 
examination at Harvard. Our own grammatical grand- 
fathers in their wisdom saw fit to transplant that bar- 
barous Grreek paradigm into an English soil^ where nothing 
but the hop-pole support of the birch rod has ever availed to 
keep it in sickly existence. Yet we still teach our wonder- 
ing babes to poll-parrot ' nominative, a man/ ' genitive, of 
a man,^ ''dative, to a man,^ ' accusative, a man,^ ''vocative, 
oh man ! ' ' ablative — non est inventus ' — although the whole 
genius of our language, which belongs to the second or 
agglutinate class, cries shame so audibly that the babes 
themselves have heard it. English ' cases ! ' there are no 
such things ! In Latin and Hebrew and Sanscrit inflec- 
tional forms have been dread realities. How such a bur- 
den could have been borne by the educated classes at 
Rome and Athens and Jerusalem it is hard to compre- 
hend. Some philologues have doubted that the Latin of 
the schools ever got spoken by any class below Hortensius 
and Cicero. But when we turn to our North American 
Indians and see how complicated the grammatical com- 
binations and inflections of their dialects have been, we 
may believe that the very shepherds of Ephraim knew how 
to use the seven forms of the Hebrew verb — kal, he cuts ; 
niphal, he is cut ; piel, he cuts hard ; pual, he is cut hard j 
hiphil, he causes to cut ; hophal, he is made to cut ; and 
hithpael, he cuts himself — as glibly as the oldest rabbi of 
the Bagdad or Tiberias schools. In fact, there is no limit 
to the ability of an educated boy in the direction in which 
that education goes. Some of the most difficult languages. 



VII.] AS A TEST OF EACE. 181 

completely artificial and admirably adapted for variety 
and precision in their nse_, are the languages of savage 
tribes existing at the present day. There is no good 
reason therefore for denying that the most ancient men of 
the oldest Stone periods had languages as complicated and 
as inflectional as any now known to exist, and with a 
vocabulary commensurate with the variety of things by 
which they were surrounded and of actions which their 
life gave birth to. 

It is not to be admitted for a moment, that we must 
trace back the existing languages to their word-roots and 
suppose these word-roots to have constituted the early 
language or languages of man. We have no liberty to 
suppose that the earliest languages were monosyllabic. 
As I have said before, it is not at all established that lan- 
guages become monosyllabic as we trace them backward. 
On the contrary, there are many things to show that the 
tendency of all languages is to grow more and more mono- 
syllabic in the course of time, that is, in the direction 
towards our day, not backward towards the beginning. It 
is not proved that '' China and Further India,^ as Prof. 
Whitney and many others with him maintain, ' are occu- 
pied by races whose languages are monosyllabic because 
they have never grown out of that original stage in which 
Indo-Germanic speech had its beginning.'' * The great 
Orientalist, Abel Remusat, even refuses to admit that the 
Chinese is entirely a monosyllabic tongue, and instances 
such compound words as tsiang-jin, workman (Zimmer- 
mann), and tschung-sse, bell -master, to justify his doubts. 
Beste shows that there are only 100 real monosyllabic 
words out of 8000 which the Chinese scholars use ; and 
although he thinks that the old Chinese was monosyllabic, 
he shows that the modern has 15 kinds of composition. 
Ampere condemns the doctrine of Chinese monosyllabism 
based merely on the- ground of single characters. Abel 
Remusat shows how the Chinese terminal -jan in adjectives 
is exactly equivalent to the terminations -ment in French 
(from mens, mentis), and -Uch in German. Plath explains 
how early introduction of Chinese monosyllabic writing 
prevented the rise of grammatical inflexions ; and while 
maintaining that the meanings of affixes remain apparent, 
* P. Ill, Smith Rep., 1863. 



182 ON LANGUAGE AS A TEST OP EACB. 

gives many instances of one root retaining many meanings, 
instead of receiving new meanings by aflSxes.* 

I have shown in a paper read before the American Phi- 
losophical Society of Philadelphia not long ago and pub- 
lished in their Proceedings, that when one classifies the 
names which have been given by people speaking many 
different dialects and languages to some one common and 
familiar and unmistakable object in nature, such as wind, 
or fire, or a stone, or the human head, or hand, this remark- 
able result is obtained : namely, that every organic utter- 
ance and shade of utterance possible to the human organs 
of speech, labial, lingual, dental, nasal, and guttural, has 
been employed to express the self-same object. I pursued 
the inquiry only through two or three hundred of the 
several thousand dialects and languages of the present or 
comparatively modern days ; and yet in this small and 
hap-hazard collection it is perfectly apparent, that while in 
one country an object may be called ha, in another it will 
be called da, in a third la, in a fourth na, in a fifth ga ; in 
others ap, at, a,r, an, ah ; in others har, or dar, or lar, or 
nar, or gar ; in others dah, or nal, or pad, or lag ; in others 
other combinations of these elements will be in use in the 
form of a simple monosyllable ; in others a more complicated 
system of dissyllables or trissyllables will exist ; and here 
and there long words will have grown up out of one or other 
of the original simple elemental organic sounds ; — and all 
these forms are in existence and in daily use in one age ; 
and all these numerous modifications of utterly diverse 
lingual elements are in constant employment to express 
one thing, and that one thing a simple, unmistakable ob- 
ject of nature affecting the senses of all mankind alike. 

I will close this lecture, then, by stating again and upon 
this new basis my conviction that most of the generaliza- 
tions of the science of Comparative Philology — those which 
take hold of all the larger problems of human history, the 
origin of languages, the migrations of nations, the diversity 
of races, the development of mythologies — are as yet grand 
failures ; and that a much more thorough- going method, a 
much profounder synthesis of facts is needed to lead us to 
the desired end of our researches in this field. 

* See his theory at the bottom of pasje 216, Sitzungbe : E.. Bair., Acad. 
1861, II. iii., and top of p. 217. On the Tone Speech of the old Chinese 
with two pages of radicals, 161 in number (p. 212). 



LECTURE yni. 

THE OEiam OP ARCHITECTURE, 

The Fine Arts preceded Belles Lettres in the order of 
time as well as in tlie order of a philosophical classification 
of the Intellectual Sciences. Men knew how to build be- 
fore they knew how to write. You may be surprised that 
I interpolate this lecture on Architecture, between my last 
lecture on Language and my next lecture on Literature. 
But I follow the order of nature. The soul of man en- 
dowed with language utters itself first in sculpture and 
painting, then in literature, then in moral and beneficent 
deeds, and finally in acts of worship, — successively em- 
ploying higher and higher faculties upon better and nobler 
materials. In the first stages of his savage existence man 
wasted most of his time and energies waiting on nature ; 
watching patiently for the rise of a trout, or for the 
approach of a deer. Much of this time was whiled away 
in reverie. The hunter lived an inner life of mere per- 
ception; a continual stream of paltry observations flowed 
through him, having merely leaves and twigs, spiders and 
butterflies, occasional startings of bird and beast and 
glimpses of the outside sky and distant landscape for 
their only objects. This was no miserable life ! It would 
be maligning the Divine Creating Charity to suppose it. 
It is the life of all animals — and they are all happy. So 
were the early races of mankind. So are all men yet. 
Come we to speak of Happiness we speak of that which 
Grod has made universal. It is a synonym for Life. 
Therefore we call Cod good. And the young man who 
leaves Harvard or Yale to tramp through the woods of the 
Alleghanies with a transit over his shoulder or a level-rod 
in his hand will soon learn how happy his first ancestors 
must commonly have been ; and w^hy the grave and me- 



184 THE ORIGIN OF [lECT. 

lanclioly Indians (as we call tliem in our ignorance) are so 
full of fun and frolic at all times wlien not subdued by 
hunger, fear or drunkenness. 

Now, tbe first and most natural and easy language of 
this animal bappiness, after gesticulation^ is sculpture. 
Hence all active savages amuse themselves with whittling. 
Witness all our boys, and all the grown-up boys of our 
Western country. The practice has been universal to all 
races, through all ages, from the beginning. It is the 
origin of sculpture, which in its turn made literature pos- 
sible; for one of the oldest forms of writingwhich we 
know, the Irish Ogham character, was whittled out on 
sticks ; and the early Egyptian characters were cut in 
stone. The tendency to employ the hands while the body 
rests is greater in cold climates than in hot ones ; and 
therefore we should expect to find eai-lier traces of sculp- 
ture in the temperate zones. But sculpture is absolutely 
universal, and commenced with the appearance of man 
upon the earth.* 

The earliest traces of it which we have (as yet) dis- 
covered, are on the scratched bones of the diluvium and 

* The ingenious author of Essai sur I'Inegalite des Races Huinaines, 
M. A. de Gobineau (Paris, 1853, Phil. Lib., vol. i. p. 356), has a theory that 
the artistic genius was equally foreign to the natures of the three great 
type races, yellow, white, and black, into which he divides mankind ; and 
that it did not make its appearance until the white and black race mingled. 
' Thus, also, by the birth of the Malay variety there sprang from the yel- 
low and black races a family more intelligent than its double parentage ; 
and again, from the alliance of the yellow and the white there issued 
means very superior to the populations purely Finnish, as well as to the 
Melauian tribes. I do not deny it,' he continues, ' these are good results. 
The world of arts and noble literature result from mixtures of blood, in- 
ferior races ameliorated, ennobled : these are marvels to applaud. The 
small are elevated. But, alas, the great at the same time are abased, and 
this is an irreparable ill not to be compensated. From the mixture of 
race come also refinements of manners, ideas, faiths, especially sweetenings 
of the passions and desires. But these are transitory benefits ; and if I 
must recognize the fact that the mulatto, of whom one can make a lawyer, 
doctor, merchant, is better than his negro grandfather, wholly uncultivated 
and good for nought, I must avow also that the Bramans of primitive 
India, the heroes of the Iliad, and those of the Schahnameh, the warriors 
of Scandinavia, all phantoms so glorious of races the most beautiful long 
since vanished, offering an image of humanity more brilliant and more 
noble, were especially the agents of civilization and grandeur more active, 
more intelligent, more sure than the mixed peoples, mixed one hundred 
times of the present epoch, and yet already they were not pure.' 



VIII.J AECHITBCTUEB. 185 

the cave-mud deposits. Many of tliese are merely marks 
left by the flint tools witli which the savages removed the 
flesh from the surface of the bone^ but some are indubi- 
tably patterns of the fancy^ scratched in that dolce fa/r 
niente mood in which a savage digests his dinner. Some 
are actually cut into imitative shapes. The most interest- 
ing specimens of Stone-age art which I have ever seen are 
those of roots preserved in the cabinet of M. Boucher de 
Perthes at Abbeville.* They were found in the peat-bogs of 
the river-bottom^ and are therefore of less extreme an- 
tiquity than the flint instruments of the diluvium. But 
they are old enough, heaven knows ! and very curious. 
They are in the form sometimes of men, with straddling 
legs and arms ; sometimes of ducks, or snakes, or frogs. 
But whatever shape it may be, some artificial addition has 
been made to it by the joking savage to increase its like- 
liness and to express his appreciation of its oddity, or per- 
haps we ought to add, in his eyes, to its beauty. For 
when we see how evidently, how inexpressibly lovely to 
the enthusiastic little mother-heart of one of our baby 
daughters her dirty, black, old, hideous doll can be we 
may believe that, to the art sentiment just sown and hardly 
yet sprouting in those aboriginal savage souls a black 
forked effigy of humanity with the addition of a cut with 
a flint knife for a mouth, and a peck on each side of its 
head for two eyes would represent Venus the goddess of 
lovehness, if not indeed Jupiter the awful thunderer. 
There is a good deal of accounting for tastes — when we 
consider circumstances. 

The next stage in sculpture was probably imitations in 
stone of the marks of wet feet and hands. These would 
first be made at river fordings, and afterwards on the tops 
of look-out mountains. Such sculpturings are described 
in books of travels all over the world. The savage crosses 
a stream by swimming and dries his dripping body on 
some sun-lit rock. Then he waits for his companions, or 
for his prey, or for his enemy. Meanwhile he pecks away 
at one of the damp footsteps on the rock. Others notice 
what he has left undone and finish it. The footprint 
becomes a permanent landmark. Some battle there in 

* The sculptured bones of the caves of the Dordogne had not been 
found when this was written. 



186 THE ORIGIN OP [lECT, 

subsequent days sliall make it famous. Some deified hero 
shall be propitiated there by sacrifices. The footprint 
becomes a symbol of worship. You have all heard of the 
two footprints sculptured on the summit of Mount Olivet 
and worshipped by pilgrims as the marks left when Jesus 
sprang into the sky at his ascension. There is another 
footprint of Jesus preserved on a stone in the Mosque of 
Omar^ at the extremity of the eastern aisle.* At Poitiers, 
in France the traveller may see two footprints of the Lord 
upon a slab enshrined in the south wall of the church of St 
Radigonde, made when he stood before her to inform her 
of her coming martyrdom. 

The prints of the two feet of Ishmael are preserved on a 
stone in the temple of Mecca which tradition says was the 
threshold of the palace of his father-in-law^ the king of the 
Dhorhamides.f Others say that they are the prints of his 
father Abraham^s feet when IshmaePs termagant wife 
drove the old patriarch away from the threshold of her 
husband's house. 

On the top of the highest mountain in Ceylon are the 
prints of Adam's feet. There are two immense foot- 
prints, 200 feet apart, on the rocks of Magdesprung, a 
village in the Hartz mountains of Germany, which tradition 
says were made when a huge giantess leaped down from 
the clouds to save one of her beautiful maidens from the 
violence of a baron of the olden times. J The holiest object 
in the great temple of Burmah is the so-called footprint of 
Gaudama, seven feet long, divided into compartments and 
sculptured in an extraordinary manner in the fashion of an 
astrological charm. 

My purpose is not to lead you into the dark chambers of 
heathen imagery. I might not be able to explain at all to 
your satisfaction this disposition of the human race to 
worship the human foot and everything belonging to it, 
though I have my theory for it. We will stick to our 
subject which is sculpture and its origin. 

But I wish I could transport this audience to a moun- 
tain top where I stood one day last spring and show them 
a specimen of savage sculpture of the most primeval type. 

* F. 33, 21, 4 index. 

t Weil's Legends of Moh mmed, 36, 23 h. t 32, 2. 



VIII.] ARCHITECTURE. 187 

It is a broad-backedj flat-topped mountain in western 
Pennsylvania^ the westernmost of those which compose 
the Alleghanies. It is cleft from summit to base, a depth 
of 1300 feet, by a narrow gorge through which flows roar- 
ing on towards the west to join the Ohio one of the 
fairest rivers in the world, the Youghioghany. On the 
southern brow of this gorge, looking down fearfully into 
it, and also looking broadly out over all the western 
country with a sweep of horizon taking in the blue 
distance of the- Pittsburg hills, there is a table of bare 
sandstone rock. The people call it as the Indians did 
before them the Cows' rock. The road runs over it ; and 
the tracks of wheels are scratched upon it. But ages 
before old Heckewelder's daughter was born the first 
white child west of the Alleghany mountains, the Indian's 
trail went over this same rock. And here the red men, 
weary with the hot and long ascent, rested themselves; 
pitched pebbles down into the abyss of the river gorge, 
and looked out over the illimitable forests of Westmoreland 
county to catch the distant smoke of the fires of their 
tribes. And while they sat they cut those fanciful figures 
in the face of the rook which still remain, half obliterated 
by the wheels of the white man's waggons, but still kept 
clean by the rains. There you may see the cloven foot of 
cows or buffalo, and human feet, and three-toed marks of 
birds, like Deane's and Hitchcock's ornithichnites, and 
waving snakes, and others not so easy to decipher. I went 
to see the place hoping that the imagination of the farmers 
had misled them and that the works would prove to be 
the casts of fossils ; but there was no mistaking their arti- 
ficial character.* 

In the same way the human hand is stamped and cut 
upon a thousand cliffs and on the walls of temples. It was 
a favourite subject of art in Central America. You know 
it was used by the Roman legions as a sacred standard. 

* Similar, more numerous, and more perfectly executed rock sculptur- 
ings, covering the stoss sides and backs of some granite islets, in the bed 
of the Sasquehanna river, at Safe Harbour, below Columbia, in Pennsyl- 
vania, have been photographed and described, from plaster casts taken of 
them by Prof. Thomas Porter, the president, and other members of the 
Linnean Society, at Lancaster, and published recently in the Proceedings 
of the American Philosophical Society at PJiiladelphia. 



188 THE ORIGIN OP [leCT. 

The two hands of man were his two great gods^, his pro- 
viders, his defenders. In the Thracian mythology they 
were the Cabiri, the great gods workers, and their children 
were the ten dactyloi, or fingers. Then, when men in old 
times grew tired of worshipping their own hands they 
began to worship the uplifted hand of the bard-priest 
blessing them and of the bard-baron crushing them. 
Afterwards its beauty seized upon the aesthetic sense of the 
artist, and men drew it and sculptured it for its own sake 
rather than for what it had accomplished. 'When the pope 
sent a commission to Michael Angelo to examine his 
ability he refused to be examined ; but, seizing a piece of 
chalk he drew a human hand so boldly and with such 
grace and such expression that no further question could 
be asked; and so he built St Peter^s.* Finally science 
drew the hand, and proved by it in a Bridgewater Treatise 
that there must be an all-wise and beneficent Creator. 

Such is the history of all the fine arts. — There is an 
insensible graduation of art for imitation into art for 
ornament. The tools of one age become the amulets of a 
succeeding age; as in the case of the Swiss flints. The 
phallus found in the Poitou cave was either an idol or an 
amulet. The ladies of Rome wore such as breastpins in 
the Augustan age. The miniature hand lies as a paper- 
weight on modern tables and as a tablet on the wristlace 
of our ladies. The selection of odd forms of roots by the 
people of the Abbeville bogs is paralleled by the selection 
of bizarre laurel-root walking-sticks by modern young men. 
And the same love of the rare and beautiful which sets so 
high a value on the emerald and diamond now, caused the 
Stone age savage to string together round his neck the 
floating bits of amber which he saw and to perforate and 
hang about his loins beautiful small shells. The same 
feelings induced the Druid warrior to wrap a golden torque 
around his arm that induces an underbred American to 
set three California nuggets in his shirtstuds. The per- 
petual search for proper and perfect slingstones must have 
cultivated to the highest pitch and at the earliest periods 
man's faculty for form and colour in the materials of art. 

* See the story in detail, in Grimm's Life of Michael Angelo, Bunnet's 
translation, vol. i. pp. 158—160. (Little and Brown, Boston, 1865.) 



VIII.] ARCHITECTUKE. 189 

Some of the works of savages strike us with astonishment^ 
such as the perforation of the precious stones by the in- 
habitants of Central America. But we must remember 
that the savage was never in a hurry ; time was not money 
then ; and what was made was kept and vahied long. The 
ivory work of the Chinese is quite as wonderful. 

But wh^ should we waste time with the earlier stages of 
man's effort to express his appreciation of the forms of 
nature ? We have in architecture the summation of all his 
efforts ; the trial of his matured powers ; the efflorescence 
not only of his taste for form and colour but of his sense of 
grandeur and sublimity^ of his ideas of the invisible powers 
by which he is surrounded^ and of his hopes of future hap- 
piness. 

I wish to confine this lecture chiefly to a discussion of 
the rise and meaning of ancient architecture. And I shall 
use the term architecture in its most ancient and not in its 
more modern sense. No two meanings attached to the 
same word could well be more different. To the imagina- 
tion of a man of the 19th century the word architecture 
conjures up a splendid vista of roofs and towers with 
battlements or spires, castles and churches, palaces and 
stores with marble fronts and decorated windows from the 
pavement to the eave; parliament houses and city halls in 
parks laid out for public recreation ; hotels of a thousand 
separate rooms ; vast railway stations^ each blocking up 
the end of some wide avenue, one exit of the city with 
long hanging vaults of wood and iron under which inter- 
minable trains of cars may load and unload thousands of 
travellers ; factories, mountainous piles of furnace-stack 
and hollow archways, girt with gigantic flues and capped 
with curious brickwork, black iron cylinders vomiting fire, 
and taller chimneys smoking in the upper air ; bridges 
like spider-webs and viaducts with wonderful arcades 
spanning the streams ; observatories crowned with domes 
like eastern mosques ; theatres and halls for music with 
organs seeming like the slumbering winds of Bolus wait- 
ing to rouse the world ; great, many-storied public schools, 
each with its tide of life ebbing and flowing with tumultu- 
ous regularity four times each day as if they were the 
ventricles of a great nation^s heart : all these and innumer- 
able private residences and villas urban and suburban, in 



190 THE ORIGIN OP [lECT. 

streets, on hill-tops, and beside tlie shore, or buried in 
sweet vales ; all these combine to make up architecture 
now. 

In ancient times it was not so, The so-called ancients, 
Greeks and Eomans of the times of Christ, only 2000 years 
ago, they had their architects for triumphal arches, aque- 
ducts, bridges, forts and palaces, as well as for religious 
shrines. Even the Assyrians and Babylonians of an age a 
thousand years earlier built palaces as well as temples ; if 
their palaces were not indeed their only temples, as their 
kings were named after and worshipped for their gods. 
But in the real old ancient times preceding all those really 
modern or grandly mediaeval histories, I mean the times 
of ancient Egypt, the times when British Stonehenge and 
the Armorican Carnak and the North African cromlechs 
and the Cyclopean walls of Italy and Greece were built ; 
in those old days there was nothing but religious architec- 
ture. The people lived in tents or cottages. Their kings 
were merely chieftains, heads of tribes, living among 
their people like Arab sheiks, or like the kings in Western 
Africa. How many ages from the beginning passed before 
the building of temples began, we cannot know. All be- 
fore the rise of architecture was an age of unconscious art, 
mixed with uncertain superstitions ; an age of fetichism 
with its vulgar sorceries, like those which form the sole 
religious ceremonies of our Esquimaux ; and with its rude 
stone idols, wooden painted posts, sacred trees, haunted 
mounds and amulets. 

The original root of all architecture can be found in the 
sepulchral mound. The Druid barrow or the Tartar tumu- 
lus became first the pyramid, then the propylon of the 
Egyptian temple, then the pagoda of India and China and 
finally the Parthenon and Pantheon of Greece and Italy. 
The pyramids of Nubia and Egypt, with one exception 
and that one not undisputed, are undoubtedly the Mausolea 
of the early Pharaohs; while all the other primeval Egyp- 
tian monuments are private tombs. The earlier Egyptian 
temples were avowedly erected in honour of deceased 
monarchs by their sons. The custom was transplanted 
from the soil of the valley of the Nile to all surrounding 
lands. The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus in Asia, Minor 
was one of the wonders of the world. No trace of it re- 



VIII.] AECHITECTURE. \ 191. 

mains. But the vast tomb of Massinissa in Numidia 200 
yards in diameter and the tomb of Hadrian at Rome still 
challenge the admiration of mankind. But why select ex- 
amples here and there when the graye-mounds of forgotten 
princes covered the entire surface of the earth, and furnish 
to our antiquaries their oldest and most precious curiosi- 
ties. Nor is it needful to go back to the youthful days of 
Mitzraim to study fragments which escaped the iconoclastic 
hammer of Cambyses only to be submerged by the Libyan 
or Arabian sands. The greatest living empire of the world 
is to-day practising and illustrating throughout its 16 pro- 
vinces^ each one a mighty kingdom in itself, that architec- 
ture of ancestor worship which^ having antedated^ will 
survive and swallow up all other works of men. The tombs 
of the Ming dynasty near Pekin show that the self-same sen- 
timents and ideas continue to rule thje human heart and 
direct the artist's hand which called into magnificent ex- 
istence five thousand years ago the Colossi of AbuSirabil 
and the Necropolis of Thebes. A thousand things in Chi- 
nese life impress the traveller strangely with the devotion 
of the entire nation to these tender and reverential tastes 
and feelings for the dead. To the father nothing is refused. 
The most acceptable present that a son can make him is a 
cofiin. He knows that death will be no bar to his advance- 
ment in honours^ for the merit of his child will illuminate 
his name. Nobility is not prospective but retrospective in 
the Central kingdom. The hero's deeds^ the sage's wisdom, 
the statesman's success ennobles not his descendants but his 
ancestry. The degenerate barbarism of Europe has sub- 
stituted the sordid interests of property for gratitude and 
piety. 

Ancestor worship, or the homage which the living off'er 
to the dead, is not only the most extensive but the only uni- 
versal form of religion upon the earth, and the oldest of 
which any traces remain in eavlj history. It was natural, 
therefore, that the first tomb should be the first temple, 
and vice versa. That desire to live which was given to 
mankind in common with the other animals as a safeguard 
to his life contained within it germs of thought and senti- 
ment which were in process of time developed into a thirst 
for immortality. This caused the living to erect their own 
tombs ; and civilization has done little to change the 



192 THE ORIGIN OP [lECT. 

ancient custom. True, circumstances may render indi- 
viduals reckless, and if long enough adverse and charged 
witli sufficient misery may even obliterate from families 
and tribes the acquired instinct of ancestral worship. 
Livingstone represents the Makololo as totally careless 
about the bodies of their dead and hostile to every re- 
membrance of their past existence.* Yet such are rare ex- 
ceptions to the general rule. 

In ancient days the father was not only the giver of life 
but the lawgiver who could order it away. Abraham sa- 
crificing Isaac to Jehovah, or sending away Ishmael and 
his mother into the desert ; Jephthah paroling his daughter 
for a month ; the king of Moab slaying his first-born on the 
city wall in sight of the hosts of Israel : — ^we read these 
stories so often that they cease to make their natural im- 
pression on us. The ancient father was in fact both family ' 
priest and king ; and when he died he became the family 
deity. The chief of a tribe was but the greater father of a 
larger family ; and when he died a grander fane arose in 
homage of his power and virtues. I am not one of those 
who entertain the theory that all the deities of ancient 
times were monarchs or benefactors or emigrating chief- 
tains deified. No ! the worship of a man ceased with the 
generation who succeeded him, as only one pope at a time 
can occupy the sarcophagus over the doorway in St Peter's. 
But nevertheless there is no denying or mistaking the 
combined action of the two causes which I have just named 
upon the rise of architecture, viz. the man^s own desire for 
an eternal mansion, and the honours which his children 
voted him. 

The most ancient specimens of architecture whose date 
we know are certain tombs of Memphis which M. Mariette 
has recently uncovered from the sands of the great plain, 
on the edge of which stand their next descendants in 
architectural age, the pyramids. These tombs were built 
originally like the houses of a city in rows, separated by 
narrow streets, some of which are cul-de-sacs or courts. 
The tombs themselves have all one form, that of a small 
pylon or truncated pyramid ; the facade, or front towards 

* See Livingstone's curious account of ' hiding the dead ' on the Zaoio 
besi. 



VIII.] AECHITECTURE. 193 

the street, decorated witli long prismatic mouldings, ter- 
minate in lotus leaves tied together by the peduncles. 
This is M. Kenan's description and he refers for illustra- 
tion to Lepsius' Denkmaeler aus yEgypten und ^thiopien, 
prem. part, pi 25, 26. You will hereafter see the import- 
ance of this ornamentation to a correct theory of archi- 
tecture; but at present let me continue the description 
of these interesting monuments. The door of each tomb 
is very narrow^ and never in the centre of the front. Over 
it is cut the hieroglyphic guitar, a cylindrical drum or 
tabret, carrying the name of the dead. Here he lives for 
evermore, always at home. It is his ' everlasting home,' 
the very term the old Egyptians used to designate a tomb. 
And the interior arrangement agreed with this idea. It 
was arranged for the reception of his surviving friends on 
certain days of the year. Therefore in the oldest times — 
at the extreme dawn of history — the first — absolutely the 
first scene v/hich is presented to our eyes is precisely 
that which the modern ti^aveller beholds when ho visits on 
All Souls' Day the Parisian cemetery of Pere la Chaise, 
or the tombs of the Ming dynasty near Pekin. Ancestral 
worship was the first and will be the last religion of man- 
kind. 

Entering now one of these old Memphite tombs one sees 
engraved upon the walls the master of the house in the 
bosom of his family ; his wife, his children, his servants, 
his scribes, his household furniture around him. His own 
portrait in bas-relief occupies the post of honour and is 
commonly repeated in several places; while a large stele 
or obelisk-like pyramid gives his titles and sometimes 
his biography, his characteristic traits, even his infirmities, 
to ensure the continuance of his personality. How strong 
must have been the lust for immortality which ruled the 
breasts of those old people ! I mentioned in a former 
lecture with what detail the agricultural habits and man- 
ners, tools and animals of this primitive Egyptian race 
was given in these family picture-galleries ; and how no 
trace of war or of religion is apparent in them. 

This we must dwell on here a little, not to discuss the 
origin of the religious sentiment or its realization in wor- 
ship, to which I shall devote a future lecture, but for the 

13 



194 THE ORIGIN OP [lECT. 

bearing of tlie fact upon the theory of architecture. In 
these tombs we find, I say, no trace of those chapters of 
the ritual of the dead, which under subsequent dynasties 
of kings and priests in Egypt came at last to constitute 
the obligatory ornamentation of all tombs.* In the an- 
cienter times of the Memphite tomb -builders the deity 
seems to have had neither name nor image. The dog 
Anubis^ on whom the trinitarian spirit of a later date be- 
stowed three heads, the Cerberus of Greek mythology, 
appears indeed upon the walls as the guardian or watch- 
dog of the tomb. But where is Osiris — that special 
funeral god of the later dynasties ? For these more ancient 
Memphite ' everlasting homes ' he has as yet no existence. 
They are in no respects funereal chapels consecrated to a 
divinity. Death is the only deity acknowledged here. 
We are in the rear of all mythologies ; behind the curtain 
the drama of religion has not yet commenced. We are 
still in the primeval age of man^s existence upon earth 
before the birth of kingdoms and priesthoods as we know 
those things ; yet also at the end of that great age, just 
when it is about to breed another age and pass itself into 
its ' everlasting home.'' 

But we have here true architecture and the fine arts 



* ' The tombs of Memphis are all dated in the six first dynasties ; and 
without this they would still indicate their relative age by their style and 
the order of their ideas. Compare them with the grottoes of Beni Hassan 
(2500 B.C.) where the ideas are the same, death the only deity of an eter- 
nal home, a grand, gay chamber alive with pictures, but with neither 
superstitions nor terrors. Then compare them with the tombs of Biban- 
el-molouk, near Thebes (1500 B.C.), and see the sudden and complete 
change ! A. Christian and a pagan tomb could not more differ. The dead is 
no longer at home ; a pantheon of gods have usurped his place ; images of 
Osiris, and chapters of the ritual cover the walls ; graved with a care as if 
the world must read them, and yet shut up in everlasting darkness, but 
supernaturally powerful. Horrible fictions, the foolishest vagaries of the 
human brain. Tlie priest has got the better of the situation ; these 
death-trials are good alms for him, he can abridge the poor soul's tor- 
ments. What a nightmare is this tomb of Sethos ! How far we have got 
from the primeval faith in death and survivance after it, without the cere- 
monial of the priest, or long list of names divine, ending in sordid super- 
stition. One of our Gothic cathedrals differs less from one of the tombs 
on the Appian Way than do the old tombs of Sakkara from those which 
fill the straage valley of Biban-el-molouk.' (Renan.) 



VIII.] AECHITECTURE. 195 

already born ; nay more, already perfect m one of their 
careers. 

Nothing, in fact, would so thoroughly dispel the scep- 
ticism of religious people respecting the antiquity of man- 
kind as a good examination of these monuments. They say 
themselves that they belong to the first dynasties of Egypt, 
and yet their construction is as perfectly beautiful as if 
they bore over their doors names of the monarchs of the 
18th or 22nd dynasties 2000 years later of date. What is 
so astonishing, so bewildei'ing, is this : that art and archi- 
tecture when we see it first is in its full maturity. The 
painting, carving and building-arts (to judge by these 
Memphite tombs) have had apparently no infancy. And 
it is only by turning from Egypt to other lands, and from 
these wonderful treasures preserved beneath the sand to 
the Cyclopean walls, to the circles of standing stones and 
to the Druid barrows that we are reminded of those vast 
stretches of time before Memphis and its people had ex- 
istence, ages of night and wandering for races of mankind 
whose only monuments were some stray boulder poised 
upon a hill, or some smooth rock beside a stream on 
which they could engrave a few rude effigies ; — races 
which have all perished without one name engraved in 
legible characters ; without one shrine to keep alive the 
remembrance of a single deity. 

But were we 'to dogmatise in this fashion about the early 
and sudden blooming out of Egyptian art or Chinese 
civilization as if they were created perfect and had no be- 
ginning simply because we can find no records of such 
beginning we must forget that a record is impossible 
without a scribe to make it. Mankind without arts have 
no means of recording the history of their arts. Art is a 
self-recording instrument indeed, but not until it is itself 
completed. And when we examine the Egyptian record a 
little closer we can perceive in it a confession of improve- 
ment and progress which relieves us of historical embar- 
rassment. If Mariette can say of the fourth dynasty that 
its opening reigns yield us prodigies of an unexampled 
civilization, unexampled at that moment in the world, a 
society definitely constituted, a development of art at a 
height hardly to be topped by the most brilliant epochs 
afterv/ards, and an architecture elegant, he must add that 



196 THE ORIGIN OF [lECT. 

all this marks a sudden and extraordinary movement tlie 
cause of whicli is hidden from our research ; and we must 
remember that three dynasties had preceded, numbering 
as many centuries as have elapsed between the Norman 
conquest and the present day ; time enough one would 
imagine for the growth of all the arts and all the 
sciences. • 

It is admirable to see with what fidelity the builders of 
the Memphite tombs did all their work. It reminds one 
of the enthusiasm of the builders of the Middle Ages. An d 
yet M. Mariette has distinguished in the early tombs of 
Egypt three classes. The most ancient,, like that of Amten, 
exhibit art and literature in process of formation^ the 
hieroglyphs widely separated (clair-seme) and in relief. 
Rude forms abound. The statues are thick and short, with 
all their anatomical details exaggerated. The second class, 
the best example of which is Ti^s tomb at Saqqarah, are 
better placed, with hieroglyphs less boldly striking and 
more harmoniously grouped, making the text more legible. 
The alphabetic element begins little by little to substitute 
itself for the syllabic, which forms so large a part of the 
older legends. Ascending genealogies become rare. The 
formulae of invocation are addressed to Anubis alone. 
The third class, contemporary with the 6th dynasty, begin 
to show the name of Osiris, and the formula of justifica- 
tion, in text more lengthened out, with beautiful forms of 
prayer and biographical recitals to vary a little the mo- 
notony of representation. In these, and in the tombs of 
the second class of the time of Ti, are found those beautiful 
and smoothly worked-out statues, with visage round and 
smiling mouth, fine nose, large shoulders and stout limbs 
which form so numerous and precious a collection in the 
Boulaq Museuui. And in these tombs are also found those 
enormous monolithic steles cut into the form of a facade of 
which the Museum has so rich a -collection also. These 
are, then, the three stages of the oldest Egyptian art. 
Then came a long break, perhaps the Dark Ages of the 
ancient empire. We pass down through five more centu- 
ries to the 11th dynasty, when a Renaissance appears, with 
Isis for its deity, and marks which cut it ofi" from any di- 
rect inheritance from the art that had preceded it by so 
long an interval. The steles, formerly square at top, have 



VIII.] ARCHITECTURE. 197 

now become rounded. The hieroglyphics have a particu- 
lar awkwardness resembling not at all those of the tombs 
of the ord dynasty. The sarcophagi are also different, 
and colours are in vogue. Then comes the splendid age 
of obelisks, colossal statues, grand grotto-temples, and all 
that make the borders of the Nile and Thebes the wonder 
of the world. 

I once enjoyed the rare opportunity of getting upon 
the roof of the Sainte Chapelle in Pa.ris in company 
of the architect to whom was intrusted the superintend- 
ence of its restoration under Louis Philipe. After I had 
feasted my eyes upon that glorious panorama — which I 
think is finer from this point of view than from the top 
of Notre Dame — I occupied myself with the bits of carving 
which surround the pinnacles of the buttresses and which 
are entirely invisible to persons in the street, — hundreds 
of leaves and flowers and delicate morsels of fretwork, 
which no eye had seen for centuries, even since the stone- 
cutters had hoisted the blocks unchiselled to their places, 
and yet as nicely wrought as if they were intended for 
the doorway in the porch. And I could not help asking 
myself the question. When will our architects get such a 
conscience as those old masons had?* And I wondered 
also when the time would come for a public taste impatient 
of our meretricious sham shop-fronts on Chesnut-street or 
Broadway, showing their ragged edges and unfinished 
cornice-ends and soft brick side walls up and down the 
street as shamelessly as harlots in the evening flaunt their 
tawdry. 

The old Memphite tombs were built to last, and to last 
beautiful. They were to be homes always. They bore no 
resemblance at all to our family tombs crowded with 
coflfins, hideous with mildew and fungous vegetation, 
generating horrors of the imagination to be surpassed 
only by those which breed within the modern so-called 
Christian doctrine of eternal damnation. There is nothing 
to suggest the Columbaria or pigeon-cote burial-places of 
the Hebrews, Phoenicians and Christians of the Roman day; 
nor those vast catacombs in which whole congregations 
of believers in a future life were laid away to sleep together 

* See Renan's beaut ^fal description of this perfect conscientious art, p 
673 (Revue des Deux Mondes, 1st April, 1865). 



198 THE OElGIN OF [lECT. 

until the archangers trump should wake them up together 
for the judgment-day. 

The Egyptian farmer^s soul lived all alone in his ' eternal 
mansion/ Each tomb was individual. Except in some 
few cases even the wife had no admission with her husband 
to it. He was satisfied with her picture among those of 
all his other domestic animals. Except on the solemn 
anniversary the narrow door was shut^ and darkness ob- 
literated the pictures except to the departed ghost. He 
was supposed to regale himself with the offered fruits and 
cooked food which his friends left in his chamber. Some 
of these touching proofs that love and veneration have 
always swelled the human bosom have remaijied there un- 
touched all those thousands of years until M. Marietta 
opened once more the doors. 

But the prime point for our reflection is the fact that 
there is nothing of the tomb about these tombs ; they are 
houses — homes. They feared but one thing — disturbance. 
With what horror must the ejection from his tomb have been 
contemplated by the old inan of the Nile ! The possible loss 
of his hereditary lands could not more shock an English 
nobleman. To be turned out and sent adrift homeless 
for ever, a poor ghost unable to build but once and never 
more ! Imagine his feelings in view of such an irreme- 
diable and infinite calamity ! I believe that these Egyptian 
sentiments, entertained as they were by all the eai-ly races 
of mankind^ were the originals of all those superstitions of 
Hades and haunted places and uneasy spirits which 
exist to-day. How different the dying Christiana's thoughts ! 
To him there is no isolation in the tomb. He sees 
heaven opened^ and flies to join the great congregation of 
the first-born in the kingdom of the Lord who rules the 
heavens and the earth under the new dispensation. And 
as the old Egyptians had the idea of immortality^ so even 
the cave-dwellers of the south of France must have been 
led by it to make their burnt-offerings to the dead^ as M. 
Lartet has shown. The peculiarity of Christianity consists 
in the fact that it was both life and immortality which were 
brought to light by Jesus Christ. 

The care with which the body of the dead was preserved 
in a sarcophagus,* and the care with which the sarco- 

* The sarcophagus is an immense cube of granite or white marble, the 



VIIT.] ARCHITECTURE. 199 

piiagus was concealed in a cliamber of its own nearly 100 
feet underground^ approaclied by a well sunk in tlie thickest 
part of tke masonry^ and then by a horizontal gallery so 
arranged as to make it extremely difficult to discover the 
whereabouts of the sarcophagus — all show how dreadful 
an idea the profanation or disturbance of his body must 
have been to the living Egyptian.* To derange his repose 
was to compromise his etei-nal salvation. How his body 
was to share in his soul's immortality perhaps, was never 
a clearly formulated dogma in the Egyptian creed, if there 
was such a creed. But mummification became afterwards 
one of the fine arts and combined sculpture and painting 
with all the most shameless tricks both of priestcraft and 
of trade. It would be a perfect farce to tell you of the 
shrewd devices of the Egyptian undertakers in a later age^ 
to say nothing of the grim mistakes which have been made 
in lecture-rooms in this, country. I remember when a 
mummy-case purporting to be that of a Pharaoh's daughter 
was solemnly opened and unwrapped before a crowded 
audience ; I think Mr Agassiz was present and took part 
in the proceedings ; the case contained the body of a boy, 
and nobody has ever been able to explain the misad- 
venture, except on general principles — that the Egyptian 
undertakers were great rascals. 

In the earliest times there were also images made of the 
deceased, but they were exquisitely well done, and the 
sole intention seems to have been to preserve the personal 
identity of the departed, to make sure that his ownership 
of his own *' everlasting home ' could always be identified 
that no false claimant might ever eject him from it. These 
images are now found concealed in little wells in the masonry 
of the tomb. . The number of them already collected is 

walls of which are sometimes decorated with prism-shaped reeds 
(rainures), and other ornaments analogous to those of the fajade of the 
torab. 

* The same spirit presides over the queer construction of the pyramids. 
Each was the inaccessible, eternal home of a king. Their entrances were 
never in the middle of a side, and carefully sealed up. The galleries 
within were fiUed with rocks, from the tumbling in of the roofs, after 
accomplishing which the workmen escaped by curiously constructed shafts 
of exit. These precautions were so successful that the chamber of Cheops 
was not reached by any explorer until the days of Caliph Mamoud, 5000 
years and more after it was built. (Renan.) 



200 THE ORIGIN OF [lECT, 

very great. Some are of wood, some of granite, some of 
marble. One, to be seen in the Museum of Cbarles X* 
represents a scribe, executed -witli tlie minute finesse of a 

* Museum of Boulaq. Some are in the Louvre. ' It is ugly, common, 
vulgar assuredly, but nothing ever came up nearer to the intention of the 
maker. It is an unequalled prodigy, this wooden statue of the Museum 
of Boulaq, to which the fellahs gave unanimously, on its discovery, the 
name of Scheickh-el-bilad, " The Village Sheik." It is the statue of a 
certain Phtah-se, cousin to the king. His wife's statue was found near 
it. The expression of naif contentment spreading itself over the smiling 
figures of these two good folks is plain enough to see. One would call 
them two Dutchmen of the times of Louis XIV. One may not doubt, 
looking at these statues, that before the period of royal despotism and 
sumptuonsness, Egypt had an epoch of patriarchal liberty. The pomp- 
ous official art of the Thouthmes and the Rameses did not lower itself to 
represent such bonhommie any more than the artists of Versailles bent 
down their dignities to paint "Magots" (boobies, puppies). In fact 
these _two astonishing morceaux are of the 4th or 5th dynasty. Will you 
say that here we have primitive art starting on its career with such mi- 
nutise ? Consider first, I pray you, that Egyptian art was not at its 
debut but in its perfection then. What is most extraordinary in this 
civilization is, that it had no infancy, We seek in vain for an archaic 
period of Egyptian art. In architecture that is easy enough to under- 
stand, for it finds the means of accomplishing its desires commonly much, 
sooner than the plaster arts can do it. But for sculpture to divest itself 
of all rudeness and awkwardness centuries are requisite. Greece, Italy of 
the middle ages, prove it. But such a statue as that of Chephren, of 
which I shall soon speak, and all the statues of the ancient empire, are 
not at all in the style of a middle age. They have a definite style of 
their own. Viewed as to the measure of the nation's genius, they could 
not be done better. Egypt in this, as in so many other things, contradicts 
the laws we assign to the Indo-Germanic and Shemitic races. She begins 
her career, not in myth, in heroism, in barbarism. She is a China, bora 
mature, almost decrepit, having always had that air at once of infamy and 
age which her monuments and her history reveal. The divine youth of the 
Yavanas (lonians, Yavanasdones, the youths, Juvenes) was ever unknown 
to her. That she started with realism, with platitude, does not amaze 
me more than that she started with good sense, good domestic economy, 
the right sense of worthy farmers, knowing exactly the number of their 
geese and asses. We are not here on the soil of Homer and Phidias ; we 
are in the land of clear and rapid conscience, but limited and stationary. 
Solon's priest of Sais thought himself sarcastic when he said, " You Greeks 
are babies ; there are none old among you ; you are all young in spirit : " 
but it was the profound error of a narrow-minded conservative, proud of 
that which marked his own inferiority. It is permitted man not to be 
always young, but it is needful to have been young once. These intelligent 
guardians of dead letters could not see what made the force and beauty of 
Greece, as many a heavy spirit of our days thinks that he has exhausted 
language against France when he has affixed to her name the epithet of 
revolutionary.' — Renan. 



VIII.] ARCUITECTUEE, 201 

perfect realism wliicla refei'S us to more ancient times 
wlien savages criticised the forms of nature with, no gesthetic 
sentiment but with the interest of life and death. Hence 
we have in these images an ethnographic precision like 
that of Chinese or any other cultivated but unideal art. 

Let us reflect a moment. Wherein does the savage of 
primeval times most differ from the philosophic citizen of 
modern Boston ? Is it not in this — that life and nature 
and art and thought were to the savage man all in detail ; 
but to the civilized are in the general ? As the savage 
spent his time alone, spearing one fish^ luring one bird, 
trapping one animal, whittling out one arrow at a time, 
measuring the ground with single paces, skulking from 
tree to tree and stopping behind each — so all natural and 
primitive art must be detailed, precise, and characteristic 
of single individual forms and movements. We on the 
contrary, we civilized people, live in crowds. Our cities 
are aggregates of houses, even with walls and roofs in 
common. Our furniture is made by machinery and shovel- 
led into our life by the million. We have lost all idea 
of distance in miles and furlongs, like the Irish woman 
from Boston vp-ho refused to believe that she had arrived 
at the West Newton station-platform, protesting that '''^if 
she^d lia^ known it wasn^t any further than that she'd ha' 
walked." All our thinking now is done in generals. Science 
is merely generalization. Hence our art has become ab- 
stract also. The feeble attempts of the Pre-Eaphaelites 
only show how utterly disagreeable to the genius of our 
day would be a return to the individualization and charac- 
teristic detailed particularity of the first stage of Egyptian 
art ; when every man built his own tomb and every image 
in it was an exact, unflattering, conscientious portrait of 
himself. 

One more reflection before we proceed. The science of 
the fine arts is the science of beauty, taste, an apprecia- 
tion of the fitness of things, harmony, proportion, sym- 
metry or rhyme, and alliteration or rhythm — that law of 
all laws in the Cosmos, the law of pulsation, vibration or 
paroxysmal repetition. Now, why do we never expect taste 
from a savage; and why do we count taste among the prime 
c.iteria of good-breeding? Ethnologists have laid down a 
rule for themselves in estimating the relative antiquity of 



202 THE ORIGIN OP [lECT. 

their discoveries. If the objects which they find are polished^ 
they consider them comparatively recent ; if ruder^ more 
ancient ; if very rude, primeval. But what right have 
they to establish such a canon ? Are there not bad masons 
a plenty laying up tumble-down walls to-day ; and miser- 
able sculptors cutting thousands of horrible tombstones 
for Mount Auburn and Laurel Hill which they expect the 
world to call fine monuments ? What is the ground for 
this distinction between rude and polished art ? I will 
tell you. The savage has bad taste, because taste is that 
faculty which deals with the true relationships of things. 
Knowledge therefore cultivates Taste j and the savage is 
ignorant. Not the knowledge of things in detail, but of 
things in their relationships. Nature deals in what we call 
delicate touches, and these require sharp eyes to see — 
loving, patient, educated eyes. This is why sorrow refines 
the soul. Sorrow is ejection from self into the world's 
wretchedness ; the hurling of the soul from its vantage 
tower of isolation down upon the hard pavements and 
among the hostile crowds below. Sorrow, disaster, teaches 
men strange bed-fellows, enlarges their comprehension of 
the worlds in which they live and so refines them. But 
even this source of refinement the savage has not ; for his 
sorrows are solitary ; his woes annihilate him like thunder- 
bolts ; he perishes too easily ; there are no ameliorations 
in his lot ; his taste continues hard, for he has nothing 
about him but the raw stuff of nature, inexorably cruel to 
him, playing with him as a cat plays with a mouse, and 
only now and then grimly laughing at him through some 
odd antic or queer shape of the animal or vegetable king- 
dom. His imitations therefore of nature must be gross, 
rude and individual. He has had neither eyes to discover 
nor tools to imitate those combinations of force and form 
which constitute nature ; still less the taste to feel those 
delicate ideals of all forms, those Ariels of the tempest of 
this earth-life, floating high before the soul, and beautiful, 
and musical as beautiful. These are the spirits of our 
architecture. These were the genii of Phidias and Prax- 
iteles, the Prosperos of that magic Isle of Art, at whose 
command sprang up the divine porticoes of the Parthenon — 
that Miranda of the Island; and the three thousand statues 
of the Olympium at Elis — that synod of all man ^s exquisite 



V^Il].] ARCHTTBCTURE. 203 

iraaginationSj tliat symposium of all forms of strength and 
beauty realized in marble^ ivory and gold. 

But even Greece was not well bred enough to compre- 
hend the grander combinations of a later day.. It needed 
the marriage of the Classic and Teutonic races to produce 
the Gothic cathedral. And when the time was fully come, 
and that wondrous world of reeded piers and skyey arches, 
buttresses and pinnacles, towers and spires, in combination, 
like the solar system, or the framework of the Christian 
church, rose above the grave of Ambrose bishop of Milan, 
see how those three thousand deities of ancient Greece 
rose too from their old seats in Elis and flew to perch 
upon its pinnacles. Painters came journeying from every 
side of Christendom to hang their histories of angels, 
saints, and martyrs on its piers. Musicians choired for 
ever in its chapels as naturally as nightingales collect 
among the copses of the Rhine. Kings, dukes and mer- 
chants built between its buttresses their tombs, or decor- 
ated shrines to their tutelary saints with offerings of every 
precious stone and work of art whatever they could find 
or buy or steal to save their wretched souls. Emperors 
hung up along its vaulting naves the tattered ensigns of 
their vanquished enemies. Pilgrims returned from Holy 
Land and poor pale women convalescing from some des- 
perate malady, placed there their shell and scrip or votive 
wax light or bouquet of artificial flowers. In times of war 
and pestilence the multitude from the surrounding country 
rushed to the cathedral church as their sure ark of safety. 
God shut them in. The deluge might rage outside; but 
they were safe. They called it therefore going into the 
temple Nave, from navis, the Latin word for ship. The old 
Greeks had the same name for a temple, Naos, because 
naus was the Greek for ship. Architecture was to the 
ancients not the building of arches but of arks, into which 
the suffering crowds might be led when troubles rose upon 
the earth and men despaired of living. 

Around the cathedral the whole religious hierarchy 
organized itself. On one side stands the baptistry by 
which the ark is entered spiritually. On the other stands 
the chapter-house where laws are made to govern the 
church and regulate its services. A covered way in one 
di -ection leads to the archbishop's palace, full of noble 



204 THE ORIGIN OF [lBCT. 

guests from every land. In tlie other direction stretch 
the cloisters of recluses^ automata by which the ceremonial 
goes on with all the rhythmical steadiness of planetary 
motion ; or learned men who keep alive the old traditions 
of it ; or charitable men busy about the hospitals and at 
bedsides, almoners of the Churches charities, or preachers 
to the poor and hard-worked million. Then in its vaults 
we have more relationships — these with the past; sarco- 
phagi of founders, builders, restorers, rulers of the Church ; 
the relics of the saints j caskets of precious jewels ; boxes 
of gold and silver plate, rich vestments, wealth bequeathed 
for the care of its roof and walls and all its numerous uses. 
If we ascend its staircase we may find within its roof a 
little village of carpenters, masons, plumbers and glaziers 
always occupied in keeping the vast edifice in good repair, 
— for it is mortal like other things in this world, and if 
unwatched would fall piecemeal and crumble (like some 
tall cliff or mountain cedar) into the dust again from which 
it rose. Happy the ancient Memphite tombs over whom 
the sonsy sands were spread like a bed of snow in winter 
to protect the grain for spring. 

I have given you this picture of the architecture of what 
"we misname ' the Middle Ages ' (but which are, as to the 
whole world-history of man, the modern times in which we 
actually live) in order to show that the development of art 
consists in these complex relationships ; that a cathedral 
temple has grown up like a mountain mass, by the addi- 
tion of layer upon layer, formation upon formation, all 
diflPerent and yet closely related ; by successive additions 
of great ideas — ideas bred of civilization, of many super- 
imposed civilizations ; ideas produced by the conflux of 
human interests ; correlated ideas of state policy, religious 
sentiment and family interests. And as it required the 
varied experiences of many ages and many races to com- 
bine in one great monument the parts of a cathedral, so it 
requires in the spectator a life rich in these ideas to 
appreciate and admire such a monument. 

The traveller must have travelled much, read much, 
been greatly conversant with human things ; swept with 
his own experience through a wide circle of adventures ; 
grasped the meanings of many social and political pheno- 
mena, and undergone great revolutions in his own soul — 



VIII,] AECHITECTUEE. 205 

or lie will walk througli tlie solemn aisles as a brute beast 
grazes heedlessly among tbe grandest and most beautiful 
scenes in nature. If lie be a narrow bigot^ lie will look on 
all the symbolic devices around him as a vulgar raree-sbow 
and scoff at the great temple as a house of idols. If he be 
a petty shopman^ he will merely price in his own sordid 
rnind the money value of the golden censer and the marble 
tomb. If he be a mere political economist he will murmur 
at the vast and useless expense of walls and arches^ 
towers and pinnacles, as Judas Iscariot did of old when 
the woman broke her alabaster box of precious ointment 
to pour its contents upon Jesus^ feet. If he be a mere 
statesman and a democrat, he will bluster over the despotism 
of priests, the selfish pride of princes and the beggarly 
self-indulgence of the monastic orders. If he be a mere 
painter or sculptor uninstructed in the greatest thoughts 
of all ages-, he will occupy his narrowed taste in paltry 
criticisms upon this or the other work of art ; carp at the 
architrave mouldings, complain of the want of symmetry 
between the more ancient Norman nave and the more 
modern pointed Gothic choir or draw detracting compari- 
sons between the fa9ade of this and of some other temple 
which he fancies rather. None but a noble mind enlarged 
by the influx of all the past can comprehend a great cathe- 
dral and the genius of its architects. 

A savage cannot do this. He is stupified by the incom- 
prehensible. The cockney Englishman — the raw Ameri- 
can grown suddenly rich by some infernal speculation — 
such men tramp through Europe like the Goths and 
Vandals from the forests of ancient Germany. They read 
no story in its monuments. They sail up the Nile, and 
although its granite walls are covered with writings these 
are blank hieroglyphics to such eyes. It is not seeing 
much that gives man taste or knowledge > it is seeing the 
relationships of things. Better see a few fine specimens 
and analyze and comprehend their relationships than see 
all things with an unenlightened, unreflecting eye. Napo- 
leon said it in his famous sentence : ' Soldiers ! forty 
centuries look down on you from the pyramids.'' The 
Anglo-Saxon calls that bombast. No ; none but a Napo- 
leon would have thought of such an apostrophe. The past 
reflect.s itself in the world^s monuments. It is the com- 



206 THE ORIGIN OF [LECT. 

monest event to tear a stupid Englishman pride Mmself on 
his nonchalance for ruins. Why ? because he is ignorant 
of history; he sees no true relation between a crumbling 
ruin and his own well-upholstered drawing-room or 
smoking-room or billiard-room at home. And yet had not 
those ruins been he had never been the comfortable^ care- 
less, arrogant, impertinent Anglo-Saxon gentleman he is. 

I have heard this story told of a New England clergyman ; 
perhaps some of you may have heard it told of some one 
else ; it may be true or false ; but it illustrates what I 
mean to say. Prying about the island of Malta to discover 
the scene of St Paul's shipwreck he noticed an English 
officer standing in a doorway and addressed him with the 
question : '' Pray, sir, can you inform me where the Apostle 
Paul was shipwrecked? ' ' Ha ! ' was the fierce and quick 
response. The brother meekly repeated the question : 
' Can you tell me where Saint Paul was shipwrecked ? ' ' No, 
sir ! we want none of your damned conundrums here ! ' 
The soldier had probably never heard of the event so full 
of interest to the clergyman ; or if he had, had never 
thought of modern Malta being the Melita of Scripture 
history. In fact, all history is a conundrum to such men. 
Savages have no history at all. 

Everything in mind, in taste, in generosity, in liberty 
of one's own soul, depends upon the view we get of great 
relationships. This is why the highest prospects please us 
least in travelling. The view from the summit of Mount 
Washington is far inferior to the views we get from many 
of the lower summits of the White Hills. We see an im- 
mense panorama, but reduced to one dead level and re- 
moved from accurate inspection. We must get some 
standing-point whence we can see the true construction of 
things. (7ow-struction, not structure only. We must be 
able to tie this and that together, glance up as well as 
down, get many vistas in many directions ; see how the 
snow feeds the glacier and the glacier breeds the river 
and the river waters the vale and the vale debouches on 
the plain. 

The finest view I know of in the United States is from 
the summit of Penobscot Knob from which you look down 
upon the valley of Wyoming. You see the whole geology 
of the region at a glance — the Third Anthracite coal 



Vill.] ARCHITECTURE. 207 

basin with its run of conglonieT'ate — the long canoe of 
the Upper DeYonian mountain inclosing it on each side 
and at the ends — outside of which spread out the Middle 
Devonian valleys. Far to the north stands the great wall of 
the Alleghanies, with the edge of the First Bituminous coal 
basin on its summit. As far to the south the Beaver- 
Meadow mountains spread themselves against the sky, 
bearing up the basins of the Second Anthracite Coal Field. 
Through a bold gorge you see the broad sheet of the 
Susquehannah river come winding superbly in among the 
corn- covered plains of Kingston in one direction and 
sweeping majestically out again through a second gap to- 
wards the west j then for the third time striking across 
the canoe between grand cliflfs it passes on towards the 
sea. Close by^ in the centre of the fertile fields of the val- 
ley^ glitters the beautiful little city of Wilksbarre. Be- 
yond it, on the Kingston side, a small grey monument 
rises to mark the place of the old story of the Indian mas- 
sacre and brings to mind the verses of the poet Campbell. 
On the same northern bank of the river, a little farther 
down, you may perceive where men have opened up an 
Indian graveyard in grading for a grand trunk railway to 
connect the mines and carry off their produce to New York. 
A hundred collieries with their tall chimneys and huge 
breakers (those curious institutions peculiar to America^ 
collieries) remind you of the genius of the present day. 
The hum of many trains fills the air. Just at your feet 
burrows a deep ravine, with a fine water-fall; and on a 
plot of grass beside it is a pic-nic party of smart shop- 
keepers and pretty girls Avho claim descent from the Con- 
necticut settlers four generations back. Passenger cars are 
being dragged up by three incline-planes to a water-shed 
four hundred feet below you. But, see ! A thunder gust 
is coming up, bred in the Buffalo mountains which bound 
the far-ofi" western horizon. It spreads its great black 
wings to the right and left^ laying its thundering bosom 
on the Wyoming mountain as it rushes on towards you. 
You stand upon a natural plate of rock on which you notice 
marks not made by man, nor by the common elements — 
long, parallel, straight lines — diluvial scratches they are 
called. You may observe they point across the valley, be- 
yond the city and the river and the monument precisely 



208 THE OEIGIN OP [lECT. 

towards tlie gap in tlie SdiicksTiinny Mountain opposite, 
througli which the river breaks at CampbelPs Ledge. A 
geologist will tell yon that these scratches were made by 
glacial ice coming from Canada. 1 he glacier^ entering by 
that gap, must once have crossed and filled the valley and 
so flowed on, southward, over the mountain top on which 
you stand. And this, of course, innumerable years before 
the Red man had discovered how to harvest maize upon 
those bloody flats. 

But, tell me ! were the Indian to return and seat him- 
self upon this eminence, would he see all this ? Or, would 
a Hebrew dealer in old clothes ? Imagine a savage hap- 
pening here when all beneath his eye was an unbroken 
wilderness, before a ship had crossed the Atlantic or a 
lump of coal had been inflamed; and then imagine Sir 
Charles Lyell, or Henry D. Rogers, or James Hall, or Sii' 
William Logan assembling there around him a knot of 
geologists, politicians, historians, engineers, artists and 
poets ; Longfellow and Emerson, Bancroft and Hildreth, 
Trautwine and Haupt, Bierstadt and Church, Charles Sum- 
ner and Wendell Philips, Treasurer McCuUoch and Chief- 
Justice Chase — if you would comprehend how wholly the 
sentiment of the beautiful and sublime depends for its ali- 
ment upon the knowledge of relationships : and then you 
can also comprehend how the architecture of our modern 
days, how the grand architecture of any past age which 
had one, needed times and revolutions and the unfoldings 
of all human passions and the realization of all human 
ideas to have an existence even in possibility. 

Savages have no art, no architecture, because they have 
no eyes except for food and danger ; because they take 
things seriatim, each unrelated to the rest. Two senti- 
ments inform the savage mind : death and the love of 
parents. These produced- the earliest art. Their ancient 
gods were things which threatened death, and persons 
who bestowed and protected life. Ancestor worship, 
therefore, or the burial and after- worship of the parent by 
the child, and of the chief or petty king by his tribe or 
subjects, constituted the first of all religions ; and tombs 
gave origin to all architecture. 

I have made this long digression for the purpose of clear- 
ing the way to some correct theory of architecture; with 



■VJI].] ARCHITECTURE. 209 

no intention, however^ of dogmatizing against other more 
or less accepted theories whicii do not seem to me so pro- 
bable^ but which, neveriineiess, ciaim more than a passing 
notice ; although I think that I can show that, while they 
draw attention to some important points in the history of 
architecture, and to a certain extent explain some stages 
of its historical development, they offer no sufficiently 
broad explanation for the great myster^^ of its original in- 
ception in the human mind. 

The first of these sub-theories, as they may be called, 
supposes that the natural caves of the earth have furnished 
the first and principal suggestions of architecture. Those 
who adopt this theory point to the fact that the most 
famous ancient shrines of India, such as those at Elephan- 
tine and Ellora, are rock-temples, artificial excavations, or 
ornamented caverns ; and that many of the ancient monu- 
ments of Egypt are tomb-temples constructed by driving 
horizontal caverns into the rock- walls of the Nile; and 
that most of the ancient temples of Greece and Eome 
were perfectly dark cells, square, or oblong, surrounded 
by columns ; mere imitations in the open air of the dark 
rock-temples of India and Egypt. The body of a Grecian 
temple is called its cella. But it is not a certain fact that 
the rock-temples of India are its most ancient edifices ; the 
topes of the Jains are probably some of them much older. 
We have lately been informed of the existence of temples 
built in the open air near Memphis much older than all the 
known cave-temples of Upper Egypt. In China we have 
no evidence of any such antiquity in the case of rock- 
temples ; and in Europe and Africa all the most ancient 
Druid monuments are either barrows or ranges of stand- 
ing stones set up in the open air. If then we can discover 
some other and better reasons for the darkness of the Greek 
and Roman temple cella, the theory of which we speak 
loses its principal support. Here Geology comes to our 
aid and tells us that the earliest places of human sepulture 
were natural caves, ceiled up to eternal darkness. After- 
wards, when men became partially civilized, they ex- 
cavated artificial caverns for tombs ; but left them un- 
adorned. At the next stage of human life upon the planet 
. these cave-tombs were ornamented first by painting, and 
afterwards by sculpture more and more elaborate. At a 

14 



210 THE ORIGIN OF [lECT. 

still later age mankind began to erect tombs in the open 
air^ especially on plains^ near the great cities^ far from any 
rock-walls or mountain -sides^ and still they built them 
dark. Thus we arrive at those great monuments^ the 
pyramids. To these^ at lengthy they added porches and 
porticoes^ such as you see in front of the Second Pyramid. 
And, finally, these porticoes suggested the construction of 
temples separate from the tombs; and thus the compli- 
cated and elaborate system of more modern architecture 
took its rise. 

The second theory which I will mention has fewer advo- 
cates. It supposes that the idea of grand architecture 
arose in the human mind from beholding those great ranges 
of natural basaltic columns which are common in volcanic 
countries. The advocates of this theory are obliged to 
rely almost entirely upon the classic styles of architecture 
for its support. They point to Doric and Ionic facades, 
and the splendid peristyle temples of Greece and Italy. 
But it is only necessary to call to mind that the earliest 
temple of which we know, namely, that one lately opened up 
by Mariette, at a distance of 30 yards south-east from the 
great sphinx, has magnificent ranges of columns in its m- 
terior. That it was built by the king I have named, 
Chephren, the third king of the 4th dynasty, and therefore 
almost at the opening of ancient Egyptian history, is 
proved by a multitude of facsimile statuettes found in a 
well attached to it, all of them stamped with the name of 
that monarch in a cartouche ; in fact, the earliest specimens 
of sculptured figures, with dates upon them, yet dis- 
covered. It is built in the form of the letter T, and its 
immense roof is sustained by two rows of huge, square pil- 
lars of rose granite along the nave, supporting an archi- 
trave of alabaster; while a third row of similar pillars 
runs along the middle of the transept. Its immense age 
and the unsophisticated manners of that earliest day are 
signalized by the severity, the methodistical simplicity of 
the whole interior. Not an ornament, not a letter is to be 
seen ; and it confirms an incidental assertion of Strabo, 
that in Egypt there used to be temples of a barbarous 
style, supported by rows of columns, and wholly unorna- 
mented. I will explain, in a future lecture, his epithet 
' barbarous.* 



VIII.] AECHITECTUKE. 211 

The rock-temples of India also^ althongli of far inferior 
antiquity^ are supported within by rows of columns elabor- 
ately sculptured. Why should we suppose the early archi- 
tects were necessitated to copy the rare instances of fine 
basaltic escarpments, when the necessity for pillars to sup- 
port a roof arises immediately from the enlargement of 
the cave. The transition from columns within to columns 
without the temple is the easiest imaginable. But we will 
find other reasons for rejecting this theory when we come 
to consider the idea of the column itself, which stood to 
the ancient mind for a symbol, quite apart from the temple. 
The column was a divine statue, — a deity. It was so in 
all the ear\j ages, to all the ancient peoples ; and it was 
magnificently so employed, with finer and finer effects, as 
mythologies were boi:n and married to each other. The 
standing stones of the Druids ; the Lot's Wives and 
Weeping Niobes of the poets ; the straight processions of 
deity-headed pillars at Carnac ; the range of eight Doric 
columns before the Parthenon ; and the circles of twin- 
columns in churches of a later age, were all generated 
from the myth of men and women turned to stone, termini 
and Caryatides, gods and priests, standing gigantic and 
solemn, in orderly silence, within or around the temple of 
the deity. The proofs of this assertion are too voluminous 
to lay before you at the end of a lecture ; but no true 
generalization upon ancient art would be half complete 
without its distinct recognition. 

There is a third theory which I must allude to briefly, 
because it has obtained many supporters in England, 
especially since the discovery of the Lydian and Carian 
monuments in the early part of this century. It supposes 
that all ancient architecture originated in an enlargement 
to public purposes of the private cottage. The theory 
depends almost entirely on Grecian art for its illustrations, 
and therefore is of very Hmited scope, neglecting most of 
the architectural records of Asia and Africa and Western 
Europe. It relies upon the form of the Grecian pediment, 
and the ornamentation of its architrave. The Greek 
builder was under the necessity of roofing his temples 
against a northern sky. Snow fell in Greece, and the 
pitched roof and over-hanging eaves were necessaries. 
These were supported by horizontal beams, like a fisher's 



212 THE ORIGIN OY [lBCT. 

hut ; the ends of the beams stuck out^ and were split by 
the weather; the rain-drops stood in beads below their 
edges; hence the Grecian triglyph ornaments; they were 
mere representations of the beam-ends and rain-drops in 
stone. Just so you will see long dental shadows cast from 
the alternate projecting tiles upon the side walls of the 
houses in Southern France^ and then these shadows imi- 
tated in stone around the eaves of the Cathedral Church of 
Toulouse. But suppose all this true, it is only the history 
of one part of the ornamentation of one style of architec- 
ture, and that of a very recent age. The great Doric 
temples at Psestum are supposed to have had no roofs, and 
yet they had end pediments. Besides, the pediment itself 
is a religious symbol, apart from all necessity for a roof. 
It represented the pyramid, as the column represented the 
obelisk. In the pediment the Greeks placed the statues 
of their gods. It was their Olympus. But the Greek gods 
were men of a still older time, and the Greek pediment 
had come to be the Olympus of their gods, only because 
the previous pyramids had been the tombs of kings. And 
so with the architrave under it. It was not the string- 
piece of a house, laid on the top of a wall to sustain the 
roof; it was a separate and ancient symbol by itself; it 
replaced in the modern Greek art the far more ancient 
flaring cornice and cord-moulding of the Egyptian temples. 
In fact, all these theories, based upon the local styles of 
Greece, have lost their credit with archeeologists since the 
discovery of the so-called ^ proto-doric ^ style of Egypt. 
The Greeks got all the essential ideas of their Doric archi- 
tecture from the ancient Egyptians ; and all the variations 
of it which are called Ionic from the ancient Babylonians 
and Assyrians. This is now so well made out that it is a 
generally accepted truth. 

The last and fourth theory of the rise of architecture 
which I need mention is still more local in its application 
than the preceding, and therefore as a general theory still 
less acceptable. It supposes that the first idea of grand 
architecture came from the woods ; from riverhanging trees 
forming long, lofty vistas to the eye, closed at the farther 
end with interlacing boughs and leafy tracery. Behold a 
Gothic church ! See how its piers arise on either hand 
like mightv trees ! See how the ribs meet over-head ! 



VIII.] AECHITECTUEE. 213 

See the west window witli its hundred mullions ! Whac 
can be more evident than that the architect had trod the 
forest aisles^ and built them o'er again in stone ! It is a 
pity to retire from such a phantasy. Nor need we. The 
last of all architecture must not only include all that went 
before it but involve new elements of beauty. The free- 
masons of Germany and France were princelike poets^ and 
they introduced into the grim conventional grandeurs of 
the Egyptian art and into the cold perfect chastity of 
Grecian art sweet humours and warm blood fresh from 
the heart of nature. They were Christians ; while their 
Grecian ancestors were pagans ; and the old Egyptian fore- 
I'unners of all were dwellers in the tombs. They broke up 
the massive piers into reedy clustered columns and shot 
their branching tops into mid-air to meet in bunches of 
foliage. They covered up the faces of the damned old 
gods of the box-shaped capitals with leaves and flowers 
so that the tender bosoms of their children might not heave 
with terror as they passed them by in advancing towards 
the altar where the Lamb of God was taking away the sins 
of the whole world. They let into the dark old tomb -like 
temple all the heaven of the sky, all the warmth of the sun 
with healing in its beams; and painted the clerestory with 
a universal rainbow ; promising by all the angels, saints 
and martyrs in those windows that wrath should be for- 
gotten. Then they went forth and built tall towers; and 
from their tops shot spires far into heaven, covered like- 
wise with angels and with roses ; and hung therein whole 
chimes of bells to drive away all evil and shower down 
in music the blessings of the upper and eternal spheres. 

Thank God for these cathedrals ! And for their loving- 
hearted, large-souled, Caucasian Christian architects. They 
builded on the ruins of foregoing styles, out of the genius 
of foiegoing days; but in the new dispensation of a su- 
perior beauty and a diviner truth. 



LECTURE IX. 

THE GEOWTH OF THE ALPHABET. 

Men must have lived a long time upon tlie earth before 
they invented an alphabet. It is a wonderful product of 
the senses, the fancy and the understanding co-operating. 
Its use by any people proves that that people has been 
civilized. If this be true now, it must have been true at 
the beginning. Thinking men set so high a value on 
letters that they have been disposed to deny man's genius 
the ability to invent them, and have therefore affirmed that 
God gave Adam letters in Paradise. But the genius of 
man, as it grew and developed its resources, was capable 
of all things necessary. If the creative plan, revealed in 
other parts of the creation, was to find its consummation 
in the development of human life through all its stages, 
upward to the highest civilization, then the germs of liter- 
ature were planted early, and appeared in due time. The 
only questions modern science feels called upon to ask are : 
how ? in what forms first ? and afterwards ? 

I said, in my last lecture that the first efforts of man- 
kind to express the a9sthetic sentiments were made in the 
direction of sculpture and architecture, under the guidance 
of certain obscure ideas which I did not attempt then to ex- 
plain. This I attempt to-night, because these same obscure 
ideas became openly and plainly embodied afterwards in 
literature. They decided in fact the shapes of the first 
letters, and the modes adopted by the earliest sculptors and 
architects for giving a plainer meaning to their images and 
temples. What I mean to assert is that the art of letters 
grew out of the arts of sculpture and architecture, and that 
we have no trustworthy clue through the mysteries of the 



THE GROWTH OP THE ALPHABET. 215 

origins and growths of alphabets until we have learned to 
comprehend the mysteries of primeval architecture. 

The first architects were beyond all doubt those religious 
teachers who civilized and intellectualized the races to 
which they belonged. Philology teaches us this much, if 
nothing more. The Greek word for a poet, TroLrjTris, in- 
volves the Greek verb iroieiv, to make or build. But the 
word poet is the same as the word bard, and the Hebrew 
word for cuttings carving, making, creating, was Bar a. 
So the old northern name for a poet, s-kald, is repre- 
sented by the ancient Egyptian words s-kar to cut,* and 
s-X^r to make. The old Egyptian word hak to carve, be- 
came in time the Latin /ac-io, and the German and English 
mach-en. The high priest of Rome was called its pontifex 
maximus, or chief builder of arches or bridges. t 

But there are other strange combinations of these func- 
tions of the priest and the temple-builder. The oldest 
Druid temples we know of are circles of stones. The 
Greeks called circles KVKkoL, dropping the r. The word 
seems to have been originally kir-kir, or liek-Kek ; for in all 
languages the letters r and I are confounded and exchanged 
one for the other. Now the oldest of all architectural 
edifices throughout the Mediterranean countries, except 
Egypt, are old walls and ruined buildings of immense 
stones, called Cyclopean. I cannot go into the discussion 
of the nature of the Cyclops, but I think it can be proved 
that they were the representatives in fable of the wild 
Druid priests of the circles of standing stones, like Stone- 
henge, from which we get our word for church, or kirk. J 
In archaic Grecian times all the poets before Homer and 
Hesiod were grouped into one class, representing a hoar 
antiquity. They were known as the kvkXlk (cyclic) poets, 
the poets or bards of the circle. The earliest of them all 
was called Arctinus, or the Arkite. Their themes were 
exclusively Arkite ; their poetry is described by the Greeks 

* Compare English 'to scar;' Welsh mountain-sides, scars. 

t^A ^*- ^^ ^^^S' ^ bard. Man squatting, wrapped up. Sarcophagus 
ST] of anx-hepi, British Museum. Bunsen's Ideograph, 104. 
Compare Hs-iri, Osiris, and his picture, Ideograph, 130. The judge is 
still more strongly marked than the poet. He sits in a bath of water. ^A- 
He is called stm, meaning judge, one who hears truth. D. 34. Ideo-^^ 
graph, 97. In Ideograph 27, the panther skin replaces the water, ^^y 

J See the whole discussion from Bozzel in Lenipriere. (B. 52. 32.) 



216 THE GROWTH OP [lECT. 

of a later day as rude, like tliat of the Welsh bards ; their 
style was Egyptian-like in its stiffness and severe sim- 
plicity. Their sphere of thought was bounded by tLe 
-magic circle of primeval mythology ; their line vanishes 
into the dim background of Greeco -Asiatic literature ; one 
of them, called the Ethiopian, sang of Memnon, They 
were entirely different from the poets who sang the wars 
of Greece : the historians, comedists and love-song writers 
of a later age. To the Greeks of Plato^'s day their poems 
corresponded to the Psalms of David in our sacred Scrip- 
tures, or to the hymns of the Eig- Yeda in the Hindu Scrip- 
tures. When the Homeric scholiasts quoted them they 
simply said ev ku/cAw Aeyet, ' as it is written in the circle,' 
just as the apostles quoted the books of the Old Testament 
saying, ' as it is written in the prophets.'' 

Proclus thus describes the ancient Epic cycle. I give a 
free translation of his words : ' The Epic cycle is deduced 
from a mixture of heaven and earth, from which came three 
hundred-handed sons, and three Cyclopses. It briefly dis- 
cusses gods and other fabulous things, and contains some 
history. It is ended by the labour of many poets at the 
murder of Ulysses by his unconscious son Telegon. Its 
hymns are still studied, not for the sake of virtue, but for 
the good order of its facts. And it preserves the names 
and countries of its bards.' 

Let me give you one of those ancient sagas — the story 
of Pelops. ' In Sipylus in Phrygia there once reigned a 
wicked king Tantalus, son of Jupiter ; he had two children, 
Pelops and Niobe. At first the gods were his friends and 
feasted at his house ; but he committed two great sins, for 
which he was sent to hell, where he remains standing up 
to his lips in water unable to obtain a drop to quench his 
raging thirst, while a great rock suspended over his head 
threatens every moment to fall and crush him. His prime 
offence was that of divulging to mortals the secrets of the 
gods which he heard at his own table. His second offence 
was the diabolical trick which he played upon his Olympian 
guests in cooking his own boy Pelops and serving him up 
as a ragout to see if their omniscience would discover 
what it was they ate. Mercury restored the boy to life, 
but could not recover his shoulder, which had been already 
eaten. So he made the boy a new shoulder of ivory. His 



IX.] THE ALPHABET. 217 

fresb. beauty now ravisTied the heart of Neptune, who 
carried him in his own golden chariot to the top of 
Olympus, until the rest of the enraged deities after a furi- 
ous knock-down and drag-out fight in the royal dining- 
hall had settled his father^s hash; then he was carried 
back to rule in his father^s stead. His descendants for 
three generations reigned in Argos ; that means the Pelo- 
ponnesus (Pelops^ ship, or Pelops^ isle). And his bones 
were afterwards taken to Troy and became the Palladium 
of that unhappy town. His sister Niobe had all her 
childi-en killed by Diana, and she herself was turned into 
stone and still sits weeping on a mountain in Phrygia.' 

There is no disputing the theory that in all the items of 
this story (and it is only an example of the whole class of 
Cyclopean poems) there rules a reference to some original 
history lihe that which the Hebrev/ poets have embodied in 
the story of Noah and Mount Ararat. Tan-tal-us repre- 
sents the Toe, or mountain, submerged to its very lips. 
The stone above his head is the ark about to touch the 
mountain-top. Tantalus is in Tartarus ; is in fact the same 
as Tartarus, the place of Torture, the cavern in the 
mountain, the home of mysteries and horrors and woes, 
the holle, hole, or hell of the Germanic nations. Niobe, the 
daughter of the mountain, is again the ark, turned to stone; 
her name, Niob, is the Bgjrptian word 0e/3 the ark of 
Osiris, and the Hebrew word Theba, Noah^s ark. The 
Grreek Taueus, a mountain, is the Arabic tel or tol, a 
mountain. But the Shemitic nations wrote all their words 
backward from right to left, and so this word tol becomes 
LOT, whose wife (her name is no where given) was also 
turned like Niobe to stone. Pelops, Niobe^s brother, was 
the Noah of the story. First, his father offered him up to 
the gods, as the Brahma of the Hebrews offered up his 
son Ikswaca (Isaac). Neptune, or the rising deluge, carried 
him up in the golden car (the ark) to the top of Olympus, 
until his father was destroyed, that is, until the Ararat was 
sunk to his very lips in the hell of waters. Then he was 
restored. His descendants reigned in Argos ; they were 
priests of Arkism. He himself became the divinity of the 
Toe, the city of Troy. And so on ad ivjinitum et ad nau- 
sernn. 

I did not intend to introduce the subject of mythology 



218 THE GROWTH OP [lECT. 

SO early in this course of lectures. It will claim our 
attention fully hereafter. But I am forced to it, in 
order to state clearly the true theory of architecture and 
the true origin of the alphabet. Architecture began with 
imitations of Tantalus and Niobe and Pelops in stone. 
Architecture began in attempts to build pyramids like 
Ararat, and to place upon their summits shrines of worship 
and houses of God symbolical of the ark. For this purpose 
islands were especially selected because they were sur- 
rounded by the sea. Sometimes even they were said to float, 
as in the case of Delos (tel). The marshes of inundated 
deltas, the level sealike expansions of the desert sands, were 
equal favourites for building places. Where water could not 
otherwise be obtained tanks were dug, and in their centres 
pyramids and temples were erected. Especial use was 
made of every natural peak of rock around which the 
fluvial mud of some great river, like the Ganges, Euphrates, 
Nile, or Rhone, had settled ; and on these the traveller is 
sure to see the ruined temples and monasteries of the old 
religions converted now into Christian churches, wherever 
Christianity has taken possession of the ground.* 

Old books on architecture are full of definitions of this 
or that style. Until recently none but the so-called classic 
styles were recognized as genuine architecture. All else 
was merely barbarous. The classic styles were those of 
Greece and Rome — Doric, and Ionic, Corinthian, Tuscan, 
and Composite. But when Bruce and Belzoni discovered 
Doric columns in Upper Egypt," and Layard and Lassen 
Ionic capitals on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, 
writers on architecture began to take larger views of the 
subject. When Daniels published his magnificent plates 
of the Pagodas of India, and Kingsborough and Stephens 
made known to the world the Egyptian-like edifices of central 
America ; when other travellers had brought to notice the 
monuments of Thibet and China, the immense statues and 
Cyclopean walls of the Pacific islands, and the Druid 
Tolmens of the Sahara desert,— then it became possible 
for Fergusson to write on architectural science a text-book 

* The pyramid of Cheops is said to be built on such a rock. Another, 
a ledge of rock in situ, is seen in the floor of the Mosque of Omar. St 
Michael's Mounts. See the St George's of the Delta of the Uhone, &c., 
and those back of Aries. 



IX.] THE ALPHABET. 219 

as far in advance of old Vitruvius^ as Ly ell's Principles 
and Dana's Geology are in advance of the local classifica- 
tions of Werner, or of Eaton's Manual. 

Still the great primal principles of architecture, in my 
opinion, have not been clearly stated by any writer. We 
are bewildered by an ever-increasing multitude of pictures. 
We must give up for a moment the study of these details 
and take a more distant and summary view of the great 
edifices of the world, if we are to detect the aboriginal 
principles of architecture. 

Let us select a Chinese or Thibetan temple, a Hindoo 
pagoda, an Egyptian propylon, and a Norwegian church, 
and set them side by side before us. Now the question 
arises, are there any prime or essential features common 
to them all? If there be, these common traits must give 
us some clue to the universal meaning of architecture, and 
therefore to its aboriginal ideas. 

I will not delay you in the answer to this question. 
Look at these pictures and you have the evidence before you. 




Fig. 1. Thibetan, Hindu, Egyptian, and Norwegian Fig. 2. An Egyptian 
temples. hieroglyphic. 

These buildings — ^in their dates and situations so remote 
from one another, in their details of ornamentation so 
different from each other — show, nevertheless, one common 
plan. Each of them consists, as you see, of two chief mem- 
bers — a lower and an upper. The lower member is a 
square pyramid ; the upper member an over-hanging box. 
All the original or religious architectures of the world have 
been framed upon this plan. And I leave it for yourselves to 
judge if it be not the plan you would expect the ancient 
priesthoods to adopt if we be permitted to suppose that 
the first great fact of human history was some such grand 
catastrophe as that of Noah's flood. The lower member of 
the plan would represent the Ai-arat ; the upper member 
would represent the ai'k that rested on its summit. 

But subdivision is the universal primary mode of growth, 
as all oologists well know. Every germinal cell first elon- 



220 THE GROWTH OP [lECT, 

gates and then parts in the middle to form two, which in 
turn elongate, separate, and form four. These four form 
eighty and so on through eternity. Thought, too, obeys 
this law of matter. The first mythology must be, in course 
of time, extended and bisected, like all other living things. 
The creation is an apothecary^s counter ; heresy is its 
golden spatula. 

We must investigate the rise of some great schism in 
mythology which produced also a great first schism in 
architectural ideas, resulting in a two-fold historic develop- 
ment of the original plan. 

While the single pyramidal pile, with the single shrine 
upon its apex, continued to be in China in Thibet and in 
India the type of the religious edifice, there arose in 
Egypt, and spread throughout the European world, a da- 
plicated type of temple — two mountains side by side, two 
arks upon their tops. The earliest Egyptian monuments 
are single ; those of the middle and later empires are 
double. Two vast propylsea tower side by side to form 
the portal of that immense group of courts and shrines 
which we call the temple of Karnak at Thebes. 

In modern times the Christian cathedrals were built 
upon this plan, but with a difl'erence. Instead of the 
twin towers being themselves capped with two arks, a 
single ark or nave was placed between them. Look at the 
huge square Roman towers at the west end of the Abbey 
of Jumieges near Rouen; at the great west-end Norman 
towers of William the Conqueror's abbey-church for men 
in Caen ; at the Gothic towers of Notre Dame in Paris ; at 
Wrongs west towers of Westminster; at all the most 
celebrated cathedrals of western Europe, some of which 
have been completed during our own lives. It is the plan 
of Christendom. 

What explanation now has history, or natural history, to 
offer of this singular departure from the original type of 
temple ? Does it mark the origin and growth of that nice 
gesthetic function of the mind which we call symmetry ? 
Is it related to the rise of those obscure but natural specu- 
lations of the old mythologists, which resulted in the spread 
of Phallic worship, and which duplicated all the gods of 
Egypt and Greece, and laid the foundation for the early 
speculations of philosophers respecting the male and female 



IX.] THE ALPHABET. 22i 

elements of force in nature ? or does it stand in evidence 
of the first attempts of the human intellect to oppose 
dualism to unity, and satisfy the human soul with a philo- 
sophy that shall explain the origin of evil without detract- 
ing from the goodness of omnipotence ? At all events, I 
think I can convince you it was no mere accident. 

Perhaps, if we could discover why the Hebrew story of 
the deluge, written in southern Syria, went to the borders 
of the Caspian Sea, to Armenia, to select a mountain for 
its scenery we might solve the riddle. The Armenian 
Ararat (see Fig. 3) is an extinct volcano, rising directly 




Fig. 3. Mount Ararat in Armenia. 

from the surface of an immense plain to the distinguished 
height of 13,000 feet. The plain is itself 3000 feet above 
the sea ; all the upper part of the mountain is therefore 
within the limits of perpetual snow. But it is not a singi< 
cone ; it is grandly duplicated ; and in the notch betwef.. 
the cones tradition says the ribs of the old ship still sleep; 
but woe to the mortal who attempts to reach its dreadful 
resting-place ! 

The cones are of unequal height, one being 13,300, the 
other only 9500 feet above the bed of the Araxes flowing 
through the plain. ' Nothing can be more beautiful than 
its shape,^ writes Morier, ' or more awful than its height. 
All the surrounding mountains sink into insignificance 
when compared to it. It is perfect in all its parts ; no 
hard rugged feature; no unnatural prommences; every- 
thing is in harmony, and all combine to render it one cf 
the subhmest objects in nature.' And we may well add, 



222 THE GROWTH OP [LECT. 

one of tlie most terrible. It is a sleeping lion. In tlie 
earthquake of 1 840, whicli lasted from June until Septem- 
ber, masses of rock and ice were thrown from tlie upper 
cones 6000 feet at a single bound, covering portions of the 
plains below with desolation.* 

It seems to have been this splendid object that cap- 
tivated the fancy of the human race as it moved westward 
along the historic belt of emigration. Mount Masius, 
the Damavend, Mount Meru, the Sufued Koh,t Adam's 
peak in Ceylon, :J: and all those other typical diluvial sum- 
rai'^j of central and eastern Asia were but single peaks, 
and satisfied the transcendental idea of a mountain. This 
double cone of Ararat (or the two Ararats, as they are 
called,) produced a ripple in the stream of tradition, divided 
it, and gave birth to the second grand order of duplicated 
architecture. § 

There must have been among the early masons the same 
diversity of natural temperament as now exists among their 
representatives. One class would be idealists and claim 
that the true prototype and divine original was the moun- 
tain idea in its absolute unity. Another party, more 
sensuous and literal, and perhaps more artistic, would de- 
vote themselves to the expansion of that first idea, and 
to the imitation of the actual Ararat, producing all their 
forms in double series. Thus even the Druid barrow came 
to be elongated and furnished with a peak at either end j 
for it is scarcely disputed now that the long barrows are of 
a later age than the round mounds. Thus also, in Italy 
the pediment was split into two, and the urn was placed 

* See Major Voskoboinikof's report in the Athenceum for 1841, p. 157; 
quoted in Kitto, sub voc. 

■f Or White Mountain, on the road to Peshawur and Cabul. Opposite 
it is Noorgill, or Kooner, a towering hill. Here the AfFghans set the 
Ark. (Burne's Travels in Bokhara, i. p. 117.) 

X The Samaritan Pentateuch gives in Gen. viii. 4, Sarandib, which is 
the Arabic name of Ceylon. 

§ u-i-'s 'The mountains of Ararat.'' It is nowhere a Bible name for_a 
mountain. Gen. viii. 4. See only elsewhere 2 Kings xix. 37 ; Is. xxxvii. 
38; and Jer. li. 27. it must have been east of Mesopotamia; see Gen. 
xi. 2, and Kitto's fine argument. In the Sibylline verses the mountains of 
Ararat are in Pi-ygia; ATra/ita in Phrygia was called by Greeks icf^wroc. 
the Ark, becaus-- enclosed by three rivers in the shape of an ark. 



IX.] 



THE ALPHABET. 



223 



between its peaks, instead of on the summit of the pedi- 
ment. (See Fig. 4.) 




Fig. 4. The Pediment, split to receive the Urn ; and the Hour-glass. 

We are now prepared to speak of ' styles/ and to study 
architecture in detail. 

Every race, almost every nation, developed the Arkite 
plan, whether single or double, in a separate style : a style 
of its own, or a composition of the styles of its neighbours 
and of preceding ages. Nothing human remaii:is un- 
changed except fundamental ideas. The whole effort of 
nature is to put forth buds and branches on every side, so 
as to realize an idea to the utmost. Nature has no sympa- 
thy with our pui-ist prejudices. She is no quaker. She 
never grows cold and stupid. She is never consistent ; 
she is always ready to go back and begin again, as water 
when stopped by some obstructiou finds new channels 
that suit it quite as well. Every style has had its own 
particular and peculiar beauties ; and every style has 
begun in simplicity and grown composite ; or become de- 
graded, as we choose to say. Every original symbolical 
form has been taken up by the apprentices of the master- 
mason who invented it, and been elaborated and intens- 
ified and repeated and varied in all possible ways, and 
combined with other symbols, until its personal identity 
has become lost amid the crowd of similar forms; until its 
nature has been perverted and its meaning contradicted 
and its eminence exchanged for degradation, and its 
beauty bartered for some cheap utility. 

As in eastern lands the slave becomes sultan, and the 
sons of princes have their eyes put out and become beggars 
in the streets, so in architectural styles the fishery's skiff 
has risen to be a cathedral, and the pyramid of Cheops 
sunk to become the chamfered point of a graveyard obelisk. 

It was in obedience to this oi-ganic law of redupH- 
cation and variation that the primitive symbolism of 



224 THE GROWTH OF [lECT. 

architecture developed itself. You remember the storv of 
the Apostle Paul and the silversmiths of Ephesus, whose 
trade was to make shrines for the great goddess Diana. It 
is understood by antiquarian scholars that these shi'iues 
were small portable models of the Ephesian Temple^ perhaps 
intended for private oratories_, like those plaster shrines 
of the Virgin Mary which good E.oman Catholics buy 
every day to place upon their dressing-tables or mantle- 
pieces. So in the earliest times the more celebrated 
monuments of architectural magnificence were thus re- 
duced for private devotion. 

The same desire to duplicate the symbol provoked the 
manufacture of ornaments in the shape of temples ; orna- 
ments not only for the person^ but for the temples them- 
selves. A modern instance of this application of art is to 
be seen in York minster^ in the centre of which, and hung 
midway between the vaulted ceiling and the floors or 
rather I should say supported in that position by an 
arch-like partition in the church called a rood loft, is seen 
the great organ, a model of the cathedral itself. Just so, 
in ancient times, the idea of a truncated pyramid support- 
insf an ark-like cornice was thinned down to the idea of a 
square column supporting a box-shaped capital. 

We must start all architecture from the Pyramid ; as we 
must draw from Ararat, or some other sacred mountain, the 
source of all mythology. R R ~ R R was the old Egyptian 
or hieroglyphic name for a pyramid. All architecture was 
in its beginnings bar-bar-ous, that is, pyramidal. The term 
was afterwards extended in its meaning by the Greeks to 
include all other objects foreign to their refined tastes and 
their artistic religion. They called the Thracians, the 
Phrygians, the Syrians barbarians, although in many 
respects more advanced in civiHzation than themselves, not 
because these nations committed savage acts or erected 
less magnificent monuments than the Greeks themselves, 
but because these nations, in their religious architecture 
and in their superstitious rites, preserved a large measure 
of that Arkite or pyramidal mythology which took its 
name from the pyramid or BAE-BAE, of old Egypt.* 

* Tlipwfiis (homo) 5s eoTi Kar'EWaSa yXoJcraav KaXbg KayoOotj. Herod. 
n. 143. Uhlinann, in his De V^eterum Egypiorura lingua et litteris. 



IX.] THE ALPHABET. 225 

The same origin is to be assigned to the obehsk^ tho 
Egyptian name of which, however, was T)(N. Some have 
talked absurdly enough about its being a representation of 
the forthputting power of nature. Others have supposed 
it an invention of the fire-worshippers to represent a flame. 
But the first appearance of fire-worship in Egypt dates 
back no farther than the 17th dynasty, and soon became 
a detested heresy; while there are obelisks of the 12th 
dynasty. 

The obelisk was merely a portable, or idealized, or ad- 
junct pyramid. It stood isolated in front of the pyramidal 
propylon. When the propylon was duplicated the obelisk 
was duplicated also. All obelisks are terminated above in 
a genuine minute pyramid. 

The same origin is to be assigned to the solitary 
column in other lands, or to the pairs of columns, like those 
which stand before the rock-temples of India. Solomon 
made two to stand before his sanctuary in Jerusalem, 
calling the one Boaz and the other Jachin. And the Jews 
were accustomed to plant two trees in every garden to re- 
present these columns. 

We reach next in order of development the arcade. 
The Egyptians had already used it for their inside galleries 
and temple-halls. The Greeks and Romans, obliged to 
roof their sacred edifices, placed it outside, underneath the 
gable end or pediment ; increasing the number of columns 
from four to six and eight, and finally carrying whole 
ranges of them around the temple cella. The pediment 

p. 31, suggests that Herodotus was led to this etymology by the Egyp- 
tian (or Coptic) expressions (ppnooa, pulcher, firji, Justus esse. But I think 
it quite possible that Herodotus rather gave the Egyptian sentiments re- 
specting the pyramid, as the oldest, most sacred, best, and most beautiful 
thing in the world. On page 27 Uhlmann thinks, from the fact that the 

Egyptian pyramus is in Arabic ^ .5>, that the py is no essential part of the 

word, but only the Coptic article ; while pafia is the Egyptian word for 
height, as it is in Hebrew (Kirch. Scala. M. 49). Compare Rossii Etym. 
jEgypt. 159. Kitto's Bibl. Diet. Other etymologies have been proposed, 
such as 7r-o8po-/3a, sepulchre of kings, but the subject is still in the dark. 
Comparative philologists, however, will agree with me that Trvp-ixid is 
directly convertible into j3ap-fiap, or vice versa, and that in the absence of 
any universally accepted etymology for nvpafiig, the Egyptian synonyme 
given in the text above is perfectly good ground for a new theory to stand 
upon. 

15 



22(3 THE GUOWTH OS- [lECT. 

whiclL they supported was but another pyramid elevated in 
the air. The words 'pyramid and pediment are the same 
in their alphabetic elements. It was in the tympanum 
of the pediment that the Greeks assembled the images 
of their Olympic deities.* The whole roof of the Grecian 
temple, although so different in outside form, was, in the 
general plan, identical with the upper or ark member of 
the structure. The Romans, not content with this, went 
one step farther and placed upou the peak of the pediment 
an TJEN. 

I must stop for a moment to enforce the argument I am 
pursuing with a definition of this remarkable word. We 
think that it is merely the Latin ur7ia, which has become 
the property of all the Eomanic languages. But, in fact, 
the Latins received it from the East. It is nothing inore 
or less than the Hebrew name for the Ark of the Covenant 
AEN (]'nj»}). But we can go still farther back. It was the 
Egyptian name for the cartouche. 

Now the cai^touche is an oval enclosure containing the 
hieroglyphic letters which make a royal name. The 
Pharaoh in his sarcophagus or urn was symbolized by his 
name in its cartouche or AE.N. The Romans merely applied 
the word to express a coffer of peculiar shape made to 
preserve the ashes of the dead. The modern urn is the 
lineal descendant of the symbolic sarcophagus of Osiris, 
and of the ark of Noah. 

Look at its peculiar shape (Fig. 4). It consists of a com- 
bination of the same two members, the ark upon the 
mountain top, which I before descinbed as constituting the 
essential parts of every piece of architecture. This urn 
the Romans placed upon the top of the temple pediment. 

Architects have capped the temple with a dome to du- 
plicate and make more eminent the representation of the 
mountain, and have placed on top of this a lily, a pine apple, 
a lantern or cupola, to represent again the ark. The Mo- 
hammedans have chosen the more appropriate ship symbol 
of the crescent. 

The same compound symbol is seen inside the churches 
of Christians in three forms : first, in the altar (al-tor, 
the mountain) and upon it the communion cup ; secondly, 

* Compare the cap ou tlie head of Perseus, ornamented with figures 
of tlie deities. 



3X.] -.HE ALPHABET. 227 

in the baptismal font upon its spreading sculptured base j 
and thirdly, in the pulpit, with its ark-like box, from which 
the preacher prophesies, and with its quaintly- carved stem 
below. Its very name puliAt is convertibly identical with 
pyramid and pediment. 

I leave a fruitful theme, capable of infinite and delight- 
ful illustration, as any one may see who enters one of the 
mororn Catholic churches built under the supervision of 
the Jesuit priests, where, especially about the sanctuary, 
symbol is piled on symbol, each one the mere repetition of 
the other, until the eye is wearied with confusion and the 
taste disgusted with excess. 

Let us go back again to earlier times when moderation 
and simplicity still kept the symbolic shape of ornaments 
sharply cut and easy to be recognized. Let us take for a 
good specimen to study, the Doric column. 

The Doric Style, so called, was not invented by that 
small tribe of Grecian people called the Dorians. As I 
have already stated, it is found in Lower Egypt in archi- 
tecture of great antiquity. It would almost be just to say 
that the Dorians were called after it. They were worship- 
pers of the Toe; and the Doric column became in their 
hands the purest, simplest, noblest and most beautiful of 
all the forms that the architectural idea has ever assumed. 
Look at it. Poets and painters have vied with each other 
in exhausting the vocabulary of admiring epithets to de- 
scribe its severe simplicity, its exquisite symmetry, its 
gracful majesty, the charm of its lights and shadows, the 
serenity of its unconscious strength ; the delicacy of its 
capital, yielding to the pressure above, yet sustaining the 
crushing weight; and the vertical contrast to the horizontal 
architrave of its fluted shaft, rising out of the expanded 
marble floor of stilobate like an island-mountain from the 
placid surface of the sea. For that is just what it was 
meant to represent. Therefore the Doric column has no 
base. And therefore, also, the Doric column is channeled 
like a mountain with valleys. The Doric channels are the 
ravines descending to the water; their shape is quite difier- 
ent from that of the Ionic or Corinthian flutes. 

Remember that we are dealing with a product of the 
fancy ! Remember, also, that the early fancy of mankind 
was a heated fancy, and had lost none of its fire in the time 



22b THE GROWTH OF [lECT. 

of Pericles. It was a religious fancy, an unscientific fancy, 
an enthusiastic fancy, a fancy sticking atnotliiag by which, 
it could reach its symbolistic ends. At all events, it was 
no modern, materialistic, cynical, critical, mechanical, 
steam-engiue building. Wall-street or State-street jobbing 
fancy. All the history of art tells us that it was finer than 
our judgment of it. 

I have already mentioned the literal exchange of L for 
E, all over the world, and the fact that the Greeks and 
Phoenicians said toe and zue where Arabs said tol and 
TEL for mountain . So the Greeks named the shaft of their 
Toric column crrvXr) (s-tol), from which we get our English 
word style, through the little column-like pencil with which 
the scribes wrote upon tablets of wax.* Is not this a curi- 
ous illustration of our proposition that the men of letters 
in old times were the architects ? But I will give you now 
a still more curious and significant coincidence. 

The favourite Egyptian hieroglyphic form of the letter 
A was a feather, plume or quill. f It stood at the begin- 




Fig. 5. A; lU; Goddess Ma ; Truth; Crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt. 

uing of all words the first sound in which was A. But a 
jackal holding a feather was the emblem of a f^cribe. On 
the head of a sitting goddess the upright feather meant 
historic tiiith. MA, the goddess of truth, had two feathers 
on her head ; as the shrine had two obelisks before it on 
which were written its history. The double letter, A A, was 
originally, therefore, written with two feathers, which, how- 
ever, in time came to stand, in the later alphabet, for the 
letter I, or rather the diphthong lU, as in the word Judaea. 
Observe the coincidence ! The Coptic tvord AA means to 
build. And the old Egyptian name for an edifice is simply 
A, the single letter A. The scribe and the architect were 
one. The temple-wall and the chisel which cut those im- 
mortal hieroglyphics into its surface were one. The 

* The S initial stands for san, Sacred. 

t See Bunsen, p. 5.56 and 561, and Ideography, No. 174-, 173. (Fig. 
5, above.) 



IX.J 



THE ALPHABET. 229 



mountain^ tol, became a carpenter^ s tool; the column 
diwindled to tlie engraver's style ; but the soul that lived 
and spoke in all of them never changed ; it was the same 
throughout the series. 

We have been occupied with but one part of the Doric 
column^ the shaft or style; let us now look at the other 
member of it^ the capital. There are etymologies con- 
nected with this also. I have said more than once that 
the words tol and toe were the same ; here is another 
proof of it. King James's version calls the capitals of 
Solomon's two columns chapiters. You will find no ety- 
mology of capital in the books except in the form of a 
reference to the Latin caput a head^ capitalis principal. 
But capitalis will not explain that other equally Arkite 
word the name of the Roman capital, that citadel which 
contained its native gods^ its treasures^ its recorded laws 
and the heart's love of the great Republic. Every city of 
any note in the ancient world had a similar citadel^ the 
home of its tutelary deities. And what was such a citadel 
called ? An arli — of course : ARX. And the records 
which it secured — what were they ? — ARChives. 

The capitol of a column^ then^ is the cap of its tol, or 
style ; the ship upon the mountain-top. And it was pre- 
cisely in the Doric order of architecture, the shaft of which 
represented the mountain idea with most precision, that we 
have a capital most simply and purely representative of the 
ship. When I thus identify cap with ship), it is only what 
is done every day in using words similarly allied^ one of 
which retains and the other has lost the initial s : such as 
cup and s-coop ; the farmer calls his cap-like bee-hive a 
s-caj> J the sailor calls the master of his ship a s-hipper ; 
and the little boat from shore a s-Mff. 

The word cup signifies holding or containing; and in 
such modern words as coop the form of the vessel is not at 
all essential to the meaning. A hencoop is not at all 
cup- shaped, but yet acts the part of a receptacle. And 
even the Latin cap-io, I take or hold, suggests no form. 
But at the beginning the form was essential to the mean- 
ing. The Hebrew word for the palnn of the hand, there- 
fore, was CAJP (tj^), because it throws itself into the form of 
a cup to receive anything. Many names of sacred shrines 
like the Kaaba of Mecca, and the profane little Kaabahs 




230 THE GROWTH OF [lBGT. 

vvliich our young- ladies find so convenient, are traceable to 
the same root which gave the ship its name. 

Going back beyond the Hebrew use of the word cap we 
get still clearer light upon its origin; for the arm stretched 
upward in prayer or oblation, with the palm of the hand 
turned upward, is one of the commonest sights upon the 
monumental walls of Egypt. Look at it for a moment 
(Fig. 6), and see how the Arkite imagination would seize 
upon this living symbol, this Doric column done in flesh 
and blood. The Hebrew word for arm was dec or toe 
(jii).* The hand lifted in prayer was therefore a true 
caph-tor, or capital. There is one very remarkable ideo- 
graph on the Egyptian monuments which can be explained 
in no other way than by reference to these facts. It is 
Bunsen'sNo. 99 (Fig. 6), a man kneeling and hold-"^ 
ing up a basin, with the pronunciation n'ham, and 
the meaning to save. What has the holding up of a 
basin to do with salvation ? Nothing, unless there 
be a reference to the great salvation of Arkite mythology. 

.Observe nov/ how our English word arm fits into all this. 
In drawing your attention to it, I am not digressing ; but 
on the contrary leading on directly to the main subject of 
this lecture, which I am impatient to enter upon in a more 
systematic manner; but all these preliminary details were 
necessary and will come of use. First, let me once more 
insist upon the identity or interchangeability of the liquids 
L and E.. Secondly, you must accept Grimm^s law a's 
equally true, although I cannot stop to prove it in extenso, 
that the labial letters B, P, F, V, the vowel U, and the nasal 
M, are also interchangeable in a certain order in all lan- 
guages and dialects 5'"et studied. Do you not call Maria and 
Mary, Molly and Polly ? Do you not call Martha, Matty and 
Patty ? Margaret becomes Maggy and Peggy, &c. Keep- 
ing this law in mind you will see how the English word 
ARM corresponds with the word ALP a mountain, pre- 
cisely as the Hebrew dor an arm, corresponded to the 
Phoenician tor and the Arabic tel a mountain. You can 
also see why the Mont Blanc of Greece was called QiLuKpos ; 
and why the mountain beast of Asia with the houdah on 

* y-ii the arm, the shoulder of an animal, force, strength, &c. "i^s be- 
lougs to a different set of ideas, regarding the arm as a weapon, or a tool. 



IX.] THE ALPHABET. 231 

his back was called an 'ELeThant ; and why the bull with 
the crescent horns received the Syriac name of ALF. The 
mountain was not named from the arm^ the arm was 
named from the mountain, and then only when held up in 
adoration, with some votive offering in its hollow palm. 
The mountain, the alp, was the beginning of all things in 
sacred history. Hence all ancient things were named after 
it. Olympus was the Ararat of Europe and curiously 
enough replaces Ararat on the coat of ai"ms of the Duke de 




Fig. 6. Doric colviinn ; Caph ; n'ham ; tarn ; escutcheon of Nevers ; CroTvn of 

the Pharaohs. 

Nevers among the beautiful sculptures in front of the old 
chateau in the middle of that little quaint city (Fig. 6). The 
most ancient and venerable river in Greece was named 
ALFaios. The aborigines of Europe were called ELVes. The 
Latin word for formerly or in ancient times was OLiM. The 
Hebrew word for eternity, or unknown infinite beginning, 
was OLM. Heixv;e the first letter of the alphabet had to be 
ALF a, or as the Shemites called it, ALF. And its shape also 
' had to be Alpine, like its name. The letter A is simply a 
pyramid or mountain with a line drawn across it. In the 
ancient bardic books of Ireland, that seat of the learning 
of old times in the Druidic west, whenever the word moun- 
tain occurred it was not written out in full, but in its place 
they merely wrote a letter A; that was sufficient. 

The science of philology as it now stands is largely made 
up of the results of the investigations of learned men into 
such subjects as these : — What is the whole number of 
distinct sounds which can be uttered by the human organs 
of speech ? What special number of these sounds have 
been selected out of the whole number for use by different 
races and tribes of men in different countries ? What dis- 
tinction of these sounds can we make into vowels, semi- 
vowels and consonants ; and of the consonants into sonants 
and surds, aspirates and sibilants, labials, dentals, linguals, 
gutturals and nasals ? What relation do some of these 



232 THE GROWTH OP [lECT. 

souucls as spokeu in one language bear to otliers of them 
as spoken in another language ; in other words, what 
is the real nature of those processes of transmutation, 
permutation, inversion, and reduplication of sounds whicli 
are all the time going on from generation to generation, 
as the tribes of men meet and influence each other^s speech ? 
How can we understand the formation of dialects ? Wliat 
are the true derivations of words ? and what is the range 
of those modifications which time keeps making in the 
meanipgs of single words ? An immense range of investi- 
gation into which I could not pretend to enter. 

I have been keeping exclusively in view one special 
inquiry : what was the origin of the alphabet ? Why 
were certain figures cut upon the surface of stone walls to 
represent certain sounds which issued from the human 
mouth ? On what principle was this done ? Why, for in- 
stance, and taking the first letter as it comes, and in its 
archaic Greek or Doric foi'm^ why was the vowel sound A 
painted to the eye by two strokes like legs and a third 
stroke across them ? What is there in the sound A to 
suggest such a shape ? Is there any natural connection 
between ,the two things ? If not, then is there any arti- 
ficial connection between them; a,nj fanciful connection? 
If so, what governed the fancy of the man who invented the 
letter A, to cause him to establish such a connection ? 
Could it have been by any possibility an accident ? 

This question, which goes down to the very roots of the 
science, has kept many brains busily thinking in all ages ; 
for the pure and direct tradition of how it was done has 
been lost this long time, and it must be rediscovered in 
very roundabout ways. Nature loves to hide the begin- 
nings of things, and seems to kill ofi" her early creations 
merely for the sake of giving palaeontologists a chance to 
develop their own intellects by the study of the fossils. 
It was a great question in the first centuries of the Chris- 
tian era when the Talmuds were written, and the Indian 
Puranas, as this pretty Oriental story may show you : — 

When Jesus was a little boy, his mother Mary took him 
by the hand and seated him at the feet of the village school 
master among the other children of Nazareth. When his 
master looked upon him he loved him and stroked his 
curly hair and called him a good boy, and he should learn 



rX.] THE ALPHABET. 233 

his a-b-c's. So lie began to show him aleph, the first letter 
of the alphabet. ' But why is it called aleph ? ' said the 
boy. 'Ask not vain questions/ replied his master kindly 
•■but proceed with the next letter hetli.' "^Not so/ said 
Jesus ; '' I must comprehend the first ; for God maketh 
nothing in vain.'' Then^ taking all the letters in order, he 
expounded unto his master the significations of all their 
forms.* 

The legend does not inform us what this divine commu- 
nication amounted to. But there is an Armenian version 
of it which gives us some idea of what it was. '' Behold/ 
said Jesus, ' how this letter A is made : the three upright 
strokes signify the three persons of the Trinity ; and the 
stroke which underlies them signifies that these same three 
are one.' To comprehend this part of the legend, how- 
ever, we must notice the shape of the letter in Armenian 
(Fig. 13, p. 240). We must remember then that this legend 
dates not merely from Christian days, but from a time sub- 
sequent to the Athanasian and Arian controversy. It was 
an Athanasian accommodation of the old Arkite trinity to 
the new controversies of the 4th century of the Christian 
era. But it was no mere monkish or scholastic whim. 
It had the essence of the old truth in it. Different as it 
looks, this strange-looking Armenian A has a form which, 
when critically studied, is essentially identical with the 
Cadmean A, the posture of the form only being vai^ied, as 
I shall show directly. 

I must here say, that one of the most remarkable cir- 
cumstances connected with the tradition of the alphabet 
is the apparent indiffereuce which the sculptors and scribes 
who invented the letters exhibited as to whether a letter 
stood upright, or leaned to the right or to the left, or lay 
upon its side, or was turned topsy-turvy so as to stand 
upon its head. We are not to suppose any greater nicety 
in writing nor any greater difficulty in reading what was 
written five thousand years ago than now. No doubt 
many an ancient scribe learned to write as badly as Rufus 
Ciioate ; or as that superintendant of the Michigan Central 
Railroad whose angry letter of remonstrance and warning 
about keeping his cows off the track was used by the 

* Norton, Vol. iii. d. 270. Discussion of the Marcosiau sect of 
Gnobtios (W. 54, 2). 



234 THE GROWTH OF [LBCT, 

farmer to whom it was addressed as a free-ticket on the 
line for a year. 

But there was a far better reason for this indifference 
than carelessness, or that familiarity which breeds con- 
tempt. If the earliest letters were pictorial symbols it 
did not much matter how they stood, provided the form 
which conveyed the idea was kept clearly before the eye. 
If any one out of several possible postures became a 
specialized and permanent variation, it was because that 
posture of the form could be also made as symbolical as 
the form itself. Such was the case of the arm. It was only 
when the arms were stretched upwards with the palms 
open, that they could typify adoration, praise, admiration, 
holy rejoicing and the like. You see it thus expressed in 
the93rdideograph of Bunsen'slist(rig. 7,p.235). Its sound 
was haa ; its meaning 'to rejoice;' and also the number 
100,000,000. It was used like the Chinese exclamation of 
astonishment Hai-aJi!^ To apply this symbol of venera- 
tion or astonishment to a special subject such as time, some 
addition had to be made to the symbol. A feather (which 
meant histoy and truth and antiquity) was placed upright 
upon the centre of its head, and then the symbol meant 
one hundred million years, or in other words an astonish- 
ing length of time. 

But when the arm was not used to express this a! of 
astonishment or veneration, but merely the sound a as it 
issues in a simple and unimportant manner from the mouth, 
or as pronounced at the end of words and through the 
nose like the on and m final of the French, or like the nasal 
and final double ^aa of the Hebrew — then the arm was en- 
graved in a horizontal position at the bottom of the word. 
"We see it, for instance, thus in that bilingual inscription of 
'the great Emperor Xerxes,' upon an alabaster vase in 
the cabinet of antiquities in the Royal Library at Paris 
(Fig. 8) which has played as important a part in the 
discovery of the lost key to the ancient Assyrian or Ounei- 

* The 94th, 95th, and 96th ideographs are variations. The arms and 
neck alone, when used with the eagle (a) as a complement (Pig. 7), sig- 
nifies the letter k, or sound ka, as in iam, black ; skai, to plough ; ^aut, 
to build ; Ka, a bull, goat, to receive ; in/ka^ copper ; tka, a STiark, &c. 
T^amb thinks that it is the Hebrew n turned upside down, oee nunsen's 
Phonetics, p. 562, vol. i. , Egypt. 



IX.] 



THE ALPHABET. 



Fia-ure 8. 



235 



Bilingual Inscription of Xerxes, on an Alabaster Vase, 
in tlie Royal Library at Paris. 

«ff^K-fTrgfTT?Tr\ 



=<K\ -^HET^\ 




Note. — Hon pe nd was Paucnier's reading, ic is now read Per aa pe aaa, 
House great the greatest; i.e., the most Sublime Porte. 



236 THE GROWTH OP [lECT. 

form writing as the more celebrated trilingual inscription 
commonly known as the Rosetta stone had previously- 
played in Egyptology.* In the upper horizontal range of 
characters, the two letters A and the two letters S were 
at once seen to correspond to the two letters A and the 
two letters Sh, in the hieroglyphic group in the cartouche 
below. In the art of reading a correspondence written in 
cypher, c'est h premier pas qui coute, a right beginning is 
all you want. Get one or two letters of the alphabet and 
the rest follow as obediently as a skein of thread when you 
have found the right end. But the hieroglyphic A here is 
represented by an eagle. The Egyptians had, in fact, 
three hieroglyphics to express this sound — the single 
feather, the arm, and the eagle. The feather, as I have 
said, standing for the initial long AA of astonishment ; the 
arm standing for the final nasal ^aa; and the eagle stand- 
ing for a sort of gently aspirated ^a, which there is no need 
to allude to farther. 

Now what I wish to fix your attention upon is the shape 
of the Cuneiform or Assyrian letter A in this inscription. 
Bemember what I have been saying about the apparent 
indifference of the ancient scribes to the position of the 
letters, provided the form was what they -wished it to be. 
I do not here allude to the position of the letters in respect 
to one another in the word; although that too is a very 
important point to which not half enough attention has 
been given in the science of language. For words were 
written indifferently backwards and forwards ; the old 
Greek inscriptions are written alternately backwards and 
forwards, from line to line, as a field is ploughed by 
farmers; and they actually called that mode of writing 
' boustrophedon,^ that is ' oxen turned.-' And you see that 
m this cartouche the Egyptian scribe has done the same 
thing. The fact is, if carving the letters preceded the 
writing of them with a pen, as it probably did, the necessity 
for using a pushing or striking force coming from the right 
hand is apparent. Nothing can be more awkward than 

* See the account of its discovery by St Martin, and its complete dis- 
cussion, in G. Pauthier's ' Ussai sur Voriyine et la formation similaire des 
ecritures figuratives cJiinoise et TLgijidivm. Paris, 1842. Part I, p. [21,. 
et seq. ' Kshharsha Neh Wuzurk — -Kshairsha Hon Pe Na=Xerxes the 
Great.' — ISee note ou page 2oo. 



nc.] THE ALPFABET. 237 

writing the Hebrew or Arabic letters ; but nothing is easier 
or more convenient than engraving them, commencing each 
letter from the bottom right-hand corner. The Chinese 
write from the top of the line downwards. On the con- 
trarjj the county land- surveyor now-a-days writes his field- 
notes upwards, from the bottom of the page to the top. 
Ail this has caused many dialectic variations in the words 
of cognate languages which have greatly puzizled philolo- 
gists ; e. g. the Hebrew kol a voice, is in Greek logos ; the 
Greek gala milk, is in Latin lac ; and if I had time to go 
through the whole alphabet with you I would have to use 
this law of inversion to explain many things ; as e. g. how 
the Theb, or ark of Noah, came to be pronounced Beth, 
the second letter of the Shemitic alphabet, and Bath , 
meaning both a house or temple and a daughter, or the 
virgin goddess of the temple. 

But my object in this course of lectures has been rather 
to state principles, to describe methods of thought, than to 
cram the imagination with detailed facts and subordinate 
results ; and I keep to the discussion of the letter A, not 
for the sake of any special pre-eminence that it may have, 
but as affording a good example of the method which 
governed the alphabet-making mind of antiquity. 

You see, then, that the position of the form of the letter 
itself, that is, its posture, was so variable that it could be 
laid upon its side, and turned over upon its head, ap- 
parently without inconvenience. Mark me,*I say apparently, 
not really. Those old wise men knew what they were 
about. Their fancy was as dogmatic as our logic, and loved 
etiquette and punctilio as well as our natural science does. 
If the old Assyrian scribes wrote the letter A thus YY\ with 
three upright strokes and a fourth stroke laid across on top ; 
and the Armenian scribes, many centuries afterwards, saw 
fit to reverse their letter A thus I I I . that is, three upright 
strokes and a fourth laid underneath — they certainly had 
some dogmatic reason for doing so. And the Marcosian 
legend of the little Jesus tells us what that was; ''to 
teach us,^ said the little master, ' that the beginnings of all 
things is one essence in three persons.' But why would not 
the stroke, when drawn ahoce do as well as when drawn he- 
low? The Egyptians expressed the emanations from the 
sun, sunlujht, by three waved lines descending from a circle 



238 THE GROWTH OF [lECT. 

surrounding a dot; and tlie ancient Chinese expressed 
spiritual emanations^ spirit, genius, genii, by tliree strokes 
beneath a fourth horizontal stroke. And although this 
figure received another small horizontal stroke subsequent- 
ly^ its meaning remained the same, and has been considered 
so impoi'tant that it forms the key to an entire class of 
Chinese words, viz. all those which relate to the spiritual 
intelligence of mankind, the power of expressing thoughts 
in words, the power of giving names to things. Its 
ancient and its modern form are both given in Fig. 9. 
p. 245. It is called cM, and means monere, significare, prce- 
cipere, ostendere, respicere, docei e, per scripturam signiji- 
care.^ 

But the Athanasian theology was not so easily satisfied; 
it had a certain technical expression to employ, viz. ' the 
hypostatical relation of three persons in one God.^ If you 
look in Greek dictionaries for the word hypostasis, you will 
be rather astonished to see no theological allusion whatever 
in its meaning ; for it stood to the Greek farmer for no- 
thing but luine lees. It meant simply what our chemists 
would call a precipitate. But it was made up of two words, 
— Jiupo under, and histemi to stand; and its original 
meaning must have been something fundamental or at the 
bottom. Angry theologians got to hurling this word at 
each other^s heads with this older meaning which perhaps 
it still retained in the learned world. The hypostatical 
union of the thr^e Divine persons meant their fundamental 
union, their personalities rooted in a common underlying 
substance or substratum. The Scribes could do no less 
than the Pharisees. The letter which had come down to 
them from Assyrian days, bearing its Arkite signification 
of eternity and divinity, the beginnings of things and the 
stuff of the world's phenomena, suited their purpose exactly, 
provided they took the fourth stroke which joined the 
tops of the other three, and put it below, making it hypo- 
statical or fundamental. 

Going back now to the Cadmean or Alpine form of the 
letter A, will you demand that I bring it into similar re- 
lationship with the Armenian and Assyrian forms ? The 
demand would be just if I asserted that the Cadmean idea 

* French Dictionary, p. 489. Also see the 113th Key, Kij. 



IX. J THE ALPHABET. 239 

of the letter was precisely the same as the Assyrian or 
Armenian idea of it. But all alphabets were not made in 
the same age, nor by the same people, nor under the same 
set of influences. All 1 wish to hint this evening is, that, 
taken as a whole, and in the earlier ages of literature, a 
general Arkite mythology governed the fancy of men and 
therefore shaped all their attempts at expressing their re- 
ligious and historical ideas both in architecture and in 
writing; and that the traces of this mythology exist under 
all modifications of the forms of letters in all alphabets 
even to the present time. 

The origin of the curious wedge form, of the Assyrian let- 
ters has not been explained. The scribes who wrote the 
archives of Nineveh and Babylon upon clay cylinders could 
have made their lines or strokes as straight and smooth as 
the Romans who wrote on wax made theirs. Letters 
made with such skill and care that they cannot be read 
sometimes without the help of a magnifying lens (a proof, 
by the way, that the lens was two or three thousand years 
older than the time of Galileo) show that the writers 
could do anything in the way of neat writing, and 
that they must have been inspired with some special re- 
verence for letters made with strokes in the shape of a 
wedge, or rather arrowhead. Now Layard has figured 
among other things found in Assyria an altar on which 
reposes a gigantic arrowhead, half as large as the altar 
itself- — as large in proportion in fact as a sheep or a calf 
would be if laid upon the altar. Lying thus upon the 
altar it must be considered as a sacred object offered to 
some God. Or, if the altar be merely a pedestal, then the 
arrowhead must be regarded as a divinity. But the arrow- 
head is just the shape of the Cadmean letter A ; is Alpine 
in the Arkite sense ; was used in divination ; carried the 
great hyperborean Druid Abaris in Greek fable on its 
back to Delphi; and was as appropriate an offering as the 
fir-cone, or as the little pyramid held in the open palm of 
the Egyptian priest. What connection may hereafter be 
traced between this worship of the arrowhead in Mesopo- 
tamia and the use of flint weapons by the people of Central 
Asia in the Stone age I will not venture to conjecture. 
It is enough for my present purpose that the construction 
of the Assyrian letters out of arrowhead- shaped strokes 



240 THE GROWTH OP [lECT. 

gave them a peculiar sanctity or significance in an Arkite 
sense, and converted them all into Alpine hieroglyphics. 

Confining ourselves therefore still to this Alpine or 
pyramid symbol^ let me ask you how an ancient scribe 
would be likely to make a letter out of it. Would it not 
be in one of these four ways ? If he worked in a 

Chinese spirit^ scorning perspective^ he would use four 
diverging strokes to express its four sloping angles. If 
he were a true artist he would use three diverging strokes^ 
the middle one perhaps a little on one side for the sake 
of perspective. If he were a literal fellow he would use 
two strokes and be satisfied with that. But if he were a 
transcendentalist he would use but one vertical stroke to 
represent the essential idea of isolated height. 

Neglect the first form as too absurd for any body but a 
Chinaman, and the last also as too transcendental to have 
come into vogue until the refinements of later ages pro- 
duced the obelisk out of the pyramid and the obeHskal let- 
ters out of the pyramidal^ it remained for the common 
Alpine letter to be made of either two or three strokes, 
joined of course at the top. Look now at this series of 
ancient Cadmean letters, of which No. 1 is from a Greek 
boustrephedon inscription, the fourth is Phoenician, and 
the rest are antique Greek. 




9 10 



You will perceive how the original form came to vary so 
much that there is in some cases now scarcely a recog- 
nizable trace of its original intention. Look again at the 
initial Sanscrit A, No. 11 of the following forms j and 




7K 



U 15 16 17 18 

when you remember that all Sanscrit letters are hung 
upon a sort of clothes-line and boxed up by vertical 
strokes, you can see how the essential three divergent 




IX.] THE ALPHABET. 241 

lines of the pyramid may come to form the cuneiform 
letter. No. 12; and, finally, the Armenian letter, No. 17. 

But there are still simpler pyramidal forms for the 
letter. The Runic A has only two strokes. No. 14 ; and so 
had some of the Roman forms of the time of the Christian 
era, Nos. 15, 16, as well as the Mceso-Gothic, No. 18. 

But there is an Irish form of great antiquity, used ex- 
tensively in Europe, which has a peculiar sig-nificance. 
No. 1 8, formed of an horizontal stroke across the summit 
of two others. By reference to this upper stroke I think 
we reach a complete understanding of the Arkite ideas of 
the early alphabet-makers. But to make this clear I must 
speak of another element of alphabetic writing, the water- 
symbol. 

19 20 21 22 23 24 

The Egyptian hieroglyph for water was three horizontal 
waved lines, often reduced to one. In process of time 
this became merely a straight horizontal line. Out of this 
Egyptian hieroglyph the Greeks made their sharp hissing 
X (S, ^), and the Assyrians their cuneiform S, No. 21. 
The early Greeks made these lines waving like the Egyp- 
tian, but the classic Greek alphabet converted the waved 
into straight lines. The Greeks and Romans used the 
same Egyptian water-symbol for the simple sibilant s; 
but they stood it up straight. No. 22 ; because water 
never hisses except when it rises in a jet or falls in a 
cataract. When they desired an alphabetic letter to ex- 
press the rmirmuring sound of water as upon the sea shore 
they preserved the original horizontal posture of the sym- 
bol ; and hence our MMs and NNs. The most ancient 
Egyptians did not recognize in their alphabet the hissing 
sound of water : it would be diflScult to say why, unless it 
might have arisen from the scarcity of rain and mountain- 
torrents, cascades and jets in the valley of the Nile. It 
is a curious fact also that they employed their water-symbol 
for their letter N ; whereas for M they chose the figure of 
an owl. 

These two sounds of water are recognized more or less 

16 



242 THE GROWTH OF [lECT. 

distinctly in all human languages. For instance^ in our own. 
Englisli we have two names for the great and little waters 
of the earth : the former we call the Main, as the Hebrews 
called it Mim. The latter we call Seas. In eastern myth- 
ology the name of the hundred-headed sea-serpent on 
which Vishnu sits is in Sanscrit Shi-shi. The name of the 
Syrian JSToah was Xisuthrus. 

The soft hissing sound of Z in Italy had the same water 
form. The dental sibilant of the Greeks, 0, was originally 
represented by the Egyptian zig-zag waterline surrounded 
by a circle. It was reduced afterwards to a line, and 
finally to a point or dot. In Arkite symbolism this letter 
had a special function in signifying things . surrounded by 
water. Thus holy Mount Athos received its name, A0, 
because the A represented a mountain, and signified 
that it was surrounded by the sea. 

Let us return once more carrying with us now this water- 
symbol to the discussion of the letters that were founded 
on the mountain idea. The diluvial mountain could be re- 
presented in three ways: either in the air, or partially sub- 
merged, or wholly submerged ; in other words, the water- 
symbol line could be drawn across it at the bottom, in the 
middle, or at the top. The first would make the Greek 
letter delta. A, the simple mountain tol or tor — our letter 
D. The second made the Greek letter alpha, A. The 
third gives us the Irish and Gothic letter a, No. 18 above. 
The Runic alphabet of northern Europe adds additional 
confirmation to these facts, by giving a pyramidal form 
to its letter t, the equivalent of the Greek d, and by calling 
it by the same name Tyr. 

Finally, to show the connection of the pyramid and 
obelisk in alphabetic forms, as in architecture, it is only 
aeedful to contrast the A and T (or D) in respect of this 
horizontal waterline, with all the other letters. These are 

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 

the only two letters, carrying the waterhne, in the old 
cuneiform alphabet ; just as they stand apart from all the 
others in the Cadmean alphabets of the west in carrying 



IX.l THE ALPHABET. 243' 

it : as may be seen in the following series. The dj, No. 27^ 
and sh, 2,8, are no exceptions^ for they are evidently 
subsequent modifications of the older simple d, No. 26. 
Nor is it less a significant fact that the only other letter 
besides a, made with three vertical strokes, is the letter th, 
No. 31. 

I could adduce still a number of other instances of the 
essential similarity between these two letters. But I have 
already far transgressed the extent to which I had intended 
to carry the illustration of the subject. As I said at the 
outset, it is impossible to do more than to give you some 
idea of its richness; and to suggest a method of inves- 
tigation which will be likely to yield the best results. 

Each letter of the alphabet might be taken up in its 
turn and its original mythological significance developed 
by comparison with other letters in the same alphabet and 
other forms in other alphabets. For instance, the liquids 
L and R were used to represent the flowing of water, 
sliding and slipping actions, continuance, and all that class 
of ideas. Mythological explanations come in everywhere. 
Rhea the goddess of the flood, from petv to flow, and 
geographical names like Rhine and Rhone are good illus- 
trations. Invention, design, the regulated fancy of a learned 
caste appear at every step. The natures of the letter- 
sounds were critically studied and ingeniously applied, as 
in the Greek word aet, (always) constructed out of vowels 
in a definite order so as to express continued existence. 

In a word, words were designedly built up by the old 
scribes, by placing the letter- symbols in all sorts of well- 
devised positions and relations to each other, until the 
Arkite fancy was exhausted and satiated with its work 
or play ; and then fresh crops of Arkisms took root in 
these strange compositions, and new series of fables sprang 
from them again to delight the taste and feed the venerat- 
ing instinct of other generations. 

But before bidding adieu to this whole subject to pass to 
quite a diff'erent one in the next lecture I must say a word 
respecting the history of the growth of the more ancient 
alphabets. 

The history which Chinese scholars give of the 
growth of their own language is precise and authentic, 



244 THE GROWTH OF [lECT. 

although their literature will not compare for antiquity 
with that of Egypt. The most ancient book they have, is 
supposed to have been written somewhat more than 1000 
years before Christ, that is, before the time of King David. 
It is called Y-King or the hook of transformations. In a 
supplement to it called Hi-thseu, edited by two learned 
Chinese of the 11th centui-y before the Christian era,* we 
find this account of the origin of Chinese writing : 'In old 
times Paoi or Foii-hi governed the world ; and lifting up his 
eyes, saw figures in the sky ; and casting down his eyes, 
saw models of them on the earth, in the forms of birds and 
beasts, and in the proportions of the earth. From these 
near and distant objects he began to trace out the eight 
symbols (koua), to penetrate the meaning of the divine 
intelligence, and to classify therein the properties of things 
by genera.^ 

An ancient commentator upon this book explains that 
the fundamental distinctions involved in this classification 
were those of the fixed and the Tnobile, the resisting and the 
yielding ; which correspond very well to the western 
mountain and water symbols. He adds that the generic 
figures were those of lakes and mountains, wind, thunder, 
&c. He then goes on farther to explain that Fo formed 
his letters by six rules. By the 1st he imitated the objects 
themselves ; by the 2nd he combined these imitations into 
groups ; by the 3rd he inverted their meanings ; by the 
4th he invented determinative marks to express accidents, 
' high and low ' for instance ; by the 5th he gave his letters 
metaphorical meanings ; by the 6th he showed by letters 
the sounds of things. Pauthier names these six classes of 
letters: 1. The Figurative ; 2. The Qualitative; 3. The 
Composite; 4. The Polar or Antithetic; 5. The very 
numerous class in which an image of the object is given 
and with it another character to express the sound of its 
name; 6. The Abstract or Figurative, He gives five or 
six characters as examples of each class, from which I 
select but one to show the plan upon which it was con- 
structed and the change its shape has undergone in course 
of time. 

* Wen-wang and Tcheou-K' oung ; see Pauthier's Essay, page 3, et 
seq. The commentator takes occasion to remark that before Fo's time 
men employed knotted cords in the administration of aifairs. 



IX. 



THE ALPHABET. 



245. 



For example: — Fig. 9. 



1st Class, 
Imitative. 

2nd Class^ 
Qualitative. 

3rd Class, 
Composite. 

4th Class, 
Polar or 
Antithetic, j 

5th Class, 

very numerous. 

Image and 

Sound 
combined. 

6th Class, 'j 

Abstract, or !• 

Figurative. J 



> Q^ the sun : now written 

2. 



morning : 



(2) )Y\ (sun and moon) 

Z^ light : now written 

r^ left 
-^ , right 





spirit, genius 
from on high : 



heart, 
. e. soul 



7K 

4^ 



In Fig. 9 above. No. 1 is the Sun, represented as on the 
Egyptian hieroglyphics, by a disc with a dot in it; 2. 
Morning, by a solar disc above a horizon line; 3. Light, 
by the two figures of the sun and moon combined ; 4. 
Left and right, by skeleton human figures, without legs, bow- 
ing different ways; 5. Spirit, or genius sent from above, by 
three slightly waved lines depending from a horizontal line, 
meaning the sky ; 6. Soul or affection^ by a heart. Many 
other and finer examples might with a little care be 
selected. The best description I have seen of the figurative 
cunning of the inventors of the ancient Chinese characters 
is in H. Noel Humphreys^ History of Writing. Take, for 
instance, the three signs following : — 



folding doors; 



f,^ 



listening; k^ +• 

" ' 1^1 question. 

mouth. 



246 THE GROWTH OF [lECT- 

Or these : 

J^ singing bird ; H' sunshino ; y4\ obscuitj . 

bird. tree. 

The passage of the figurative into the phonetic is accom- 
plished under class V. by a union of the two ; thus, a 
duck is not only drawn, Fig 10, but has a character added 
to express the sound of its name hi. A willow is repre- 
sented by a tree and the phonetic M. A root is repre- 
sented by a tree, and a phonetic hen. &c. 

Fig. 10. 

•i^ rK^ f(\ls 

Ki Ki Ken 

E.ude as this method is, it was the one adopted also by 
the inventors of the Egyptian hieroglyphics. In fact, these 
phonetic adjuncts are little else than the matres lectionis of 
the Hebrew, in the essential genius of their purpose. 

There are some remarkable fables relating to this inven- 
tion of the great Cadmus of the East, which throw a new 
light upon its nature. In one passage it is said that Fo 
got the external ^orms of things from the heavens, biit his 
letter -figures he saw ' upon the picture which issued before him 
from the waters.' And this mystic Arkite description of the 
nature of the origin of letters does not by any means stand 
alone. It is repeated by other writers, and in other forms, 
and has no doubt some deep significance. Men whose 
books are filled with practical wisdom, humour and wit, 
shrewd sarcasm and a refined fancy do not utter what 
seems the sheerest nonsense, the folly of babes, without a 
oause. 

Lopi, the author of the ancient * book of itineraries,* 
writes, that Fohi called his new invention Dragon-writing, 
because he found it in marks upon the back of a Dragon- 
horse vjhich rose out of the waves. For the same reason all 
the great mandarins or scribes in early days were denomin- 
ated dragons. It will occur to you at once that Cadmus, 
whom the Greeks considered the inventor of the alphabet, 



IX.] THE ALPHABET. 247 

obtained his colonists by sowing the teeth of a dragon. 
The hydra, the many-headed dragon of Greek fable, as its 
name shows represented the raging waves of the sea. The 
Chinese word Shan, a mountain, is expressed by a charac- 
ter which shows three teeth. The centaurs of Greece — 
half vn&A, half horse — were the learned men of that heroic 
age, ' the priests of the mountain,^ ~T)2i ]'^^2 > and their 
chief initiated Hercules and Achilles into all the mysteries 
of learning which then were. 

Whatever maybe the date assigned to the origin of the 
alphabet, or what the country, the fable still wears this 
peculiar mountain-water or Arkite garb. One Chinese 
authority, Hoai-nan-tseu (189 B.C.) asserts that Thsan-hie, 
crown lawyer to the Emperor Hoang-ti in 2698 B.C. was the 
inventor. Another fixes on a somewhat lower date, 2357 B.C. 
But here again the fable shows itself in a still more perfect 
form ; for the tortoise has always been the living and walk- 
ing symbol of the Tor, the Druid under his tumulus ; and 
therefore the Indian mythology piles the earth upon the 
elephant and the elephant upon the tortoise. The great 
sea-tortoise especially, seen with his back above the waves, 
struck the ancient Arkite imagination with transcendant 
admiration. So the story goes that the Emperor Yao in the 
year 2357 b.c began to trace letters in imitation of the cha- 
racters which he noticed on the hack of the divine tortoise 
which was brought to him by a barbarian family from the 
far south. This tortoise was three feet wide and a thousand 
years old ; and on its back was written in Kho-teau cha- 
racters the whole history of the tuorld from its beginning. 
The land of the south may have been India, or Mesopo- 
tamia, or Egypt, for all that we know to the contrary. A 
similar, but long subsequent, arrival of learned strangers 
about 4110 B. c. (a date not very far from that of Solomon^s 
commerce with Ophir, by the way ) is mentioned in the 
Li-tai-ki-sse.* 

After describing the dragon-scrip of the most ancient 
times, and the tortoise-shell alphabet of the 24th century 
before Christ, the Chinese historians go on to tell us that 
during the Han dynasty, i. e. from 2205 down to 1766 B.C., 
the people got used to writing a thircl but also extremely 

* Pauthier, p. 10. 



248 THE GROWTH OF [lECT. 

ancient kind of characters, such as are seen on bells, vasea 
and tripods preserved in the present museums and palaces 
of the celestial kingdom. 

When the Tcheoii dynasty came in, before the time of 
Solomon, 1134 B.C., its founder introduced a new modij&- 
cation of the alphabet, called the bird tracks, Niao. Soon 
afterwards, that is, under the Wen-Wang dynasty, 1110 
B.C., the fish- gambol characters, Nu, came into vogue, and 
every kind of polite learning got systematized. It was at 
this time that the sage Pao-chi invented the five rules 
of politeness, the six kinds of music, the five methods of 
archery and the five styles of horsemanship ; and fixed for 
all succeeding times the six styles of writing as now re- 
cognized by all Chinese scholars. 

In 221 B.C. Li-sse, at the emperor^s command, invented 
the small tchovan writing ; but it was rejected except for the 
royal signets ; and then he invented the ta or great tcheuen 
writing, a most artificial and fantastical form of character 
wholly different from those that had been in use, viz. under 
the Tcheoil dynasty, 880 B.C., which scarcely differed from 
the Kou-wen or ancient figurative forms in which the six 
Kings, &c. of Khoung-tseu and the great Commentary of 
Tso-kieov-meng were all written. 

Then came the -lissolution of the Empire and the rise 
of the great heptarchy of independent provinces which 
caused local modifications of the characters chiefly due to 
difierences in ai-tistic taste. One of these provinces, the 
easternmost, ruled over by a dynasty called Han, had 
wisdom enough to throw overboard the whole literature of 
the past and attempt to open for the national mind a new 
career. 

Once, only this once, in the history of this strange na- 
tion there seemed a chance of the establishment of that 
tremendous power in letters which changed the face of the 
intellectual world in the far west ; I mean a pure phonetic 
alphabet such as gave Grreece its empire over thought 
and Rome its empire over society and Palestine its throne 
■of grace and worship over Christendom. Even Egypt knew 
enough to adopt a demotic or current hand. The number 
of Chinese characters amounts to 80,000. The whole num- 
ber of Egyptian characters in Champollion^s Dictionary is 
but 749. Those which modern science is content to use. 



rx.] 



THE ALPHABET. 



249. 



even including all the matlieinatical, chemical and othpT- 
signs^ would not amount to many more than a hundred. 
What China would be now, had the invention of the bold and 
easy cursive hand-writing been adopted by the Han dynasty 
in A.D. 76 to 88 no one may say. But the purely phonetic 
'bureau hand/ fsao as it was called, would probably have 
set the soul of China free from the incubus of its strange, 
fossilized, monosyllabic, uncompromising characters, which 
weighs the future down for ever under the load of all the 
past. But the experiment did not succeed. The emperor, 
Hiao-ho-ti, in A.D. 89 while John was writing his great 
Grospel, annulled the new invention on the ground that it 
disturbed the public education, and ordered a return to 
the culture of the ancient hand ; on which his head gram- 
marian, Hiu-chin, immediately composed a treatise in 40 
books, which sealed the fate of China to the end of time. 
The Chinese characters now in use have certainly not 
varied in shape since the year 618 of the Christian era.* 

But to show how they have varied since the invention 
of letters by Fohi, I take from Pauthier the following 








specimens of the three ancient styles, called : 1. the 
Kouwen, of the highest antiquity; 2. the Td-chouen, of 
mean antiquity; 3. the Siao-chouen, of low antiquitv ; 
followed by, 4. the Li-chou, or bureau character; 5. the 
Hing-chou, common or current hand ; 6. the Thsao-choti, 
cursive hand ; 7. the Kiai-chou, square seal character ; 
and, 8. the Kiai-Jiing-cliou or current hand, all of more 
modern age. Fig. 12 gives the original Xo» wen characters 

* Pauthier, p. 21. 



260 THE GROWTH OF [lECT. 

for ^heaven/ '"man/ and the 'savage beast sse/ followed 
by the modifications of form to which they were subjected, 
corresponding to the other seven styles of writing suc- 
cessively coming into vogue during the four thousand 
years which have elapsed since the reputed age of Fo. 

It is only by tracing the forms of the Chinese radicals 
back through their various transformations to their original 
that any comparison with the Egyptian hieroglyphs can 
be made ; but when this is carefully done important analo- 
gies are discoverable. The classification of ideas common 
to both eras has been made upon a common principle, 
which was in fact to be expected from the very constitu- 
tion of the human mind. But in some instances forms 
are also common to the two systems_, establishing some 
actual historical connection between the two such as is 
hinted at by the legends cited above. 



9 10 11 





12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 



Figure 13 gives the twenty- two* characters which the 
priests of Egypt invented for determining the class to 
which any particular hieroglyphic belonged^ when its pro- 
nounced or written name would not of itself show. The 
modern alphabetic writing has done away with the neces- 
sity for such a rude device^ but originally some such 

* Pauthier's Essai, p. 103. Uhlemann gives thirteen, on the authority 
of Ideler, based on Champollion. Bunsen's list is more extensive. 



IX.] THE ALPHABET. 251 

metliod was indispensable. For instance^ tlie difference 
between sheej) and sJiip in English is made in writing by 
using in one case two vowels e, and in tbe other one vowel 
i. But in the absence of vowels it would be necessary to 
add to the word shp some sign^ in the one case a rude 
picture of a boat^ and in the other case a rude sketch of an 
atiimal. This is precisely the mode in which the Egyptians 
used the following determinative signs^ standing for — 1. all 
names of gods j 2. of goddesses; 3. of men; 4. women; 5. 
members of the body ; 6. quadrupeds ; 7. birds ; 8. rep- 
tiles ; 9. fish; 10. trees; 11. plants; 12. metals; 13. 
stones; 14. edifices or habitations; 15. places; 16. stars; 
17. divisions of time; 18. fire; 19. fluids; 20. things noxious 
or ecclesiastically impure or unclean, represented by a spar- 
row; 21. scripture; and 22. actions. 

Under these I have arranged a selection from the whole 
list of over 200 Chinese radicals, such as represent the same 
ideas, by equivalent denominative signs. These are named 
in Chinese : 1- Ky (Radicals, 113, 119, p. 489 of the Great 
French Dictionary); 2. My, p. 534; 3. Jin, 9, p. 8; 4. 
Niiu, 38, p. 138; 5. Jo, 130, p. 587 ; 6. Nieou, 93, p. 398; 
7. Niao, 196, p. 899; 8. Tchong, 142, p. 655; 9. Yu, 195, 
p. 891; 10. Mo, 75, p. 288; 11. Tsao, 140, p. 615; 12. 
Peh, 154, p. 724; 13.^Chy, 112, p. 478; 14. Mien, 40, p. 
145, and Yen. 53, p. 177; 15. Kin, 167, p. 793, Y, 163, p. 
779, and Febu, 170, p. 818; 16. Chin, 161, p. 765; 17. 
Jy, 72, p. 274; 18. Ho, 86, p. 3b0; 19. Choiiv, 85, p. 343; 
20, 21. Yu, 129, p. 586; 22. Hing, 144, p. 672. 

The principal alphabets to be studied are the Punic; 
the still but partially understood Italic or Etruscan group ; 
the Phoenician, Samaritan, Himyaritic, Arabic, Hebrew, 
Coptic and Amharic; the Armenian; the three ex- 
tremely ancient cuneiform alphabets ; the Davanagari and 
other alphabets in India; the Thibetan; the Burmese, 
Siamese and Singalese of farther India; the Japanese 
and the Corean. They are all different at first sight from 
one another, and some are comparatively modern. But 
when critically studied they are all found to be allied more 
or less distantly. Of all these the Corean is the most per- 
fectly regular. 

Our own alphabet, derived from the ancient Cadmean, 



252 THE GROWTH OP THE ALPHABET. 

is theoreticallj reducible to four or five letters, represent- 
ing that many classes of sounds : 



'owels. 


Labials. 


Gutturals. 


Dentals, &c. 


A 


B 


c 




D 


E 


F 


G 




H 


I 


M 


K 




L 





P 


Q 




EST 


u 


YW 




X 




T 








Z 



A mere glance at this scheme will show that the letters 
of the alphabet were not placed fortuitously in their posi- 
tion ; that the vowels came in the order of their vocal de- 
velopment ; in a wordj that the entire alphabet is a fivefold 
orderly repetition of the first four letters, ABCD which in 
themselves sum up the entire range of sounds, and make 
the key notes to all the dialectic transmutations of letters 
to which I have already drawn attention more than once 
before. These transmutations occur regularly only within 
the respective columns of this scheme. For instance, B is 
exchanged for F, M, P, or Y, but never for C, G, K, Q, or 
X ; nor for D, H, N, R, S, T, or Z. In cases where a let- 
ter of one column seems to be transmuted into a letter of 
another column, as in the often-quoted instances of William 
for Gulielmus, — German welch for old English quilk, — 
French garenne for English warren, &c.,a loss of some letter 
must always be supposed, or the substitution of one of the 
vowels for one of tbe letters. In the three instances just 
quoted the initial g is lost : — thus g-william for g-ulielm, 
q- welch for q-uilk, g- warren for g-(b)arenne. 

It is true that in the fourth column are collected dentals, 
Unguals, sibilants, a nasal and an aspirate, but all tbese 
are proved to be transmutable by the simple method of 
comparing a dozen or two of allied dialects. D and T arc 
in fact the same letter; L and E, are universally inter- 
changeable ; S and Z are identical ; N is the nasal of D, as 
M is of B ; and H is in fact a sibilant in its simplest form, 
as such words as aks and sel show. 

Here I must leave this fascinating subject, hardly having 
taken the first step across its threshold, but only thrown 
open the door to exhibit the immensity and magnificence 
of its interior. 



LECTURE X. 

THE FOUR TYPES OF RELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 

If the views be correct which I have very imperfectly 
expressed in the previous lectures of this course, we are 
now prepared to enter upon the last and most important 
and most interesting subject connected with the early 
history of man — the origin of its mythologies. 

It will be necessary to keep always in view the funda- 
mental distinction between religion and worship. Religion 
is the soul of worship. Worship is the body, the phe- 
nomenal form of religion. The religious life of man con- 
sists of a combination of three of his elemental forces, — 
Admiration, Love, and Fear — having for their object of 
activity the invisible or superhuman world. 

As there are four great types of organic animal life, 
represented by the Articulate, Radiate, Mollusc, and Ver- 
tebrate kingdoms, — so there are four great types of this 
religious life, embodied in the Worship of the dead, the 
Worship of the powers of nature, the Worship of God in 
heaven, and the Worship of the universe. 

Under these four heads all human conceptions of the 
divine as worshipful can be collected. In one sense they 
are four successive stages in the order of the development 
of the human intelligence governing the exercise of the 
instinct of worship. They are not only philosophically 
consecutive in the order of nature, but to a certain extent 
also historically consecutive in the order of time. They 
have co-existed in some ages, and been combined and in- 
termixed in some countries, just as in the case of the four 
types of animal hfe. But they have virtually followed 
each other in ruling the world, just as in the succession 



264 THE FOUR TYPES OF [LECT. 

of geological ages Radiates had their maxvmwm develop- 
ment first, Molluscs next, and Vertebrates last of all. 

For it will not do to affirm — drawing- sharp lines of 
distinction — that in the ages of mane's first appearance 
on the planet there was no other worship than that of 
their dead parents, or of the manes of their heroes ; that 
everywhere there followed Fetichism or the worship of 
the powers of nature ; that then in later times all nations 
attained to the higher worship of some Fate, or Jove, or 
God of Heaven ; and that finally, in these last times, a 
genuine Pantheism has grown universal. Far from it. 
Complex enough have been the '^-ombinations of religious 
ideas as far back in history as we can see. Yarieties of 
the individual, co-working with varieties of race and with 
the various stages and kinds of civilization, have kept not 
only alive but in full vigour the worships of the past side 
by side with one another, and with the higher worships of 
the present day, developing in fact their four great types 
in four parallel lines , just as in the growth of the whole 
animal kingdom we notice that Radiates and Articulates 
lived together in the oldest sedimentary rocks, and are 
represented still in the multiform fauna of to-day ; while 
Molluscs and Vertebrates, from the time when these ap- 
peared, have been mixed in with them through all the 
higher and later sediments. 

All that we can affirm therefore is this ; — that the 
earliest times of mankind seemed to be stamped with the 
forms of ancestral worship chiefly, some of which have 
lasted to the present moment; — fetichism of all kinds — 
stone worships, mountain worships, water worships, fire, 
air and sky worships, Sabeeism, Mithraism, Indraism 
and the astrological systems of the ancients flourished 
chiefly in a second age, but have also lasted to our day ; 
—then the cultivation of the Taste by idolatry and of the 
SentiTYients by mysticism produced at the beginnings of 
historic times grand, dominating, ceremonial worships of 
a god supreme, Jove and Jehovahism, culminating in 
Christianity ; and that, finally, the culture of the Intellect 
has developed Pantheism. 

When circumstances favour their growth all these types 
are developed in a single nation, in a single individual; 
but they come to consciousness in this one order only. 



X.] • EELiaiOUS WORSHIP. 255 

Their consecutive development has been realized in all 
the cultivated portions of the great historic section of the 
race. Pantheism has expressed itself in the Hindu Vedas 
and in the Christian writings ; by Plotinus the Pagan and 
by Spinoza the Christian ; by Swedenborg in one charac- 
teristic form and by Hegel in another. On the one hand, 
children and savages cannot be Pantheists. On the other 
hand^ philosophers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Blanco 
White, historians like Buckle, naturalists like Von Baer 
were equally impossible in the Stone period. There is a 
time for everything under the sun. Ages may overlap. 
One nation may outstrip another in its religious develop- 
ment. One race may huriy forward from Fetichism to 
Pantheism with greater intellectual vivacity than another ; 
but he who aspires to be the historian of mythologies must 
learn to recognize or have the genius to construct out of 
the apparent confusion which has thence ensued some 
wide, consistent, ever- working law of growth, some com- 
prehensive system of religious development residing in the 
very nature of the common mind of man. 

If now there be four types of religion, there are also but 
four modes of worship. I use the word here in a more 
precise and restricted sense. The religious sentiments of 
man, intelligently directing themselves towards any one of 
the four great objects of adoration, embody themselves in 
four forms of worship. In other words, all the religions of 
the ages have become incarnate with folir members : 
Prayer, Praise, Offering, and Sacrifice. They correspond to 
the instincts of religious Feai', religious Love, religious 
Policy, and religious Conscience or the sense of justice. 
And they have filled the world for ages upon ages with 
cries, and songs, and gifts, and altar-smoke. 

As worship is a body for the spii"it of religion, so cere- 
monial is the dress which these four kinds of worship 
wear. Ceremonials are merely special shapes and combin- 
ations of prayer, praise, offering, and sacrifice, devised by 
the clerical imagination, localized by circumstances, and 
sanctified by long tradition. 

In common parlance we speak of ceremonials as religions ; 
and we class men rudely by them. There could not be a 
more unphilosophical mistake. An ethnologist might as 
well attempt to classify the races of mankind by the 



256 THE FOUR TYPES 0¥ [lECT, 

fashions of their clothes. No two kinds of ceremonial^ for 
example^ could be more unlike than that of the Romish 
Church on the one side^ and that of the Quakers^ Puritans, 
Methodists, or Moravians on the other. And yet if we ana- 
lyze the Papist and the Protestant with equal scrupulosity 
and skill, we shall obtain what chemists call ' allotropic 
elements^ in both. What is Protestantism but melted 
sulphur dropped into cold water ? or, if the amour jprojpre 
of my audience demand another simile, red phosphorus, 
innoxious to the manufacturers ? In the Romish commu- 
nion you have Calvinist and Arminian, Jansenist and 
Jesuit, Rationalist and Mystic, just the same and just as 
eager as in the Protestant communions. There is not a 
spiritual distinction with which intercourse and literature 
have made us familiar that we cannot discover (of course, 
with intellectual modij&cations of expression, due to various 
culture ) in all the religions of the modern world. 

Nor is the rule confined to them. The same is true of 
the ancient mythologies. Under a ceremonial Joseph's 
coat of many colours they present a grand simplicity 
of essential symbolism. But the fourfold distinction of 
religious type remains ; and combinations of the four modes 
of worship in each type are there. The mythologist must 
not allow himself to be cheated by the variety of cere- 
monial details. The confusion of priesthoods, and mysteries, 
and creeds, and fables, is only in appearance and in words, 
not in reality — only in the visible organizations and local 
establishments of the worshippers, not at all in the funda- 
mental ideas that inspired and regulated their worships. 
Let us look at these — 

I. The worship of the dead. 

I have said so much on this subject in previous lectures, 
that nothing remains but to place it in its true relationship 
of precedency to the other forms of religious thought and 
conduct. 

If it were necessary to add anything to the testimony 
which the Egyptian tombs of the first six dynasties afford 
to the extreme antiquity of ancestral worship among the 
more civilized nations at the dawn of history, we would 
find such additions in the mention of it in the hymns of 
the Rig Veda, the oldest literature of southern Asia. The 
laws of Menu speak of it as the most ancient religion of 



X.] RELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 257. 

mankind. Long after Brahmanism had substituted for the 
idea of immortality tlie doctrine of Metempsychosis, the 
custom of the sraddha or funereal repast continued to 
be kept ; rice, milk, roots, fruit, were furnished regularly 
to the departed soul. The Greeks and Romans, and in 
fact all branches of the Aryan race, sacrificed periodically 
at the tomb. 

So universal were these rites that De Ooulanges thinks 
himself justified in basing upon them his theory of the 
Family Law of the ancients. The stranger was excluded. 
The dead accepted service and homage only from his chil- 
dren and descendants in direct succession. '^ The dead,' 
says Lucian, ' who has left no son receives no offerings, 
and is exposed to a perpetual famine.' So long as the 
family supplied their head with what he needed in the 
other world, so long he was its god and benefactor. The 
living needed the dead, the dead the living, equally. This 
mutual tie produced the solidarity of the family, the clan, 
the tribe. 

But from this service women were excluded. The 
hearth became an altar; the son became a priest. The 
daughter was always a servant — first to her father, then to 
her brother, then to her husband ; once married, she 
passed into another family ; marriage was a second birth — 
the wife was the daughter of her husband. If the dead 
had only daughters he lost his immortality, became a 
larva, or returned to earth in another body to obtain 
another family. ^The extinction of a family says the 
Baghavatgita ' causes the ruin of the religion of that 
family.' ' No man ' says a Greek writer ' knowing that he 
must die can care so little for himself as to be willing to 
leave his family without descendants, for then no one can 
worship him.' *■ If a man die without sons ' says the 
Mosaic law ' let his brother marry his widow and procure 
him children.' ' By children ' says the law of Menu ' a 
man acquits his debt towards his ancestors and secures his 
own immortality.' The Hindu who had no son married 
off his daughter on the condition, that her first son should 
be considered as his own. 

This was the origin of the custom of adoption at a later 
period. The hereditary rights of property were first estab- 
lished entirely in the interest of this overwhelming re- 

17 



258 THE POUR TYPES OF [lECT, 

ligious consideration ; property could protect the hearth, 
the tomb, the funeral rites^ the immortality. '' Eeligion 
prescribes ' says Cicero '' that the possessions and the 
worship of each family should be inseparable, and that the 
care of the sacrifices should always devolve upon him. to 
whom the inheritance belongs/ The right of primogeni- 
ture in England is maintained by precisely analogous con- 
siderations. The Roman daughter could inherit nothing 
from her father. The Greek laws forbade the daughter to 
inherit anything. The common law derived from Rome 
considers the daughter always as a minor. 

The adoption of a son, also, by another man than his 
father removed him entirely from his own family and 
passed him irrecoverably over to another, as in the ca se of a 
married daughter. When the demagogue Claudius curried 
favour with the populace by causing himself to be adopted 
by a plebeian Cicero thundered at him the tremendous 
rebuke ' Wliy dost thou expose, by thine own fault, the 
religion of the Claudian clan (gens) to become extinct !' 
Athens was but a confederation of families ; a number of 
families formed a cpparpta, a number of phratriae a tribe, and 
the tribes combined composed the city. The religion 
of the family retained its integrity long after the religion 
of the city was formulated in a more splendid shape. The 
fathers of the families became the dii Gentiles ; the city had 
its eponym deities. 

So much for the classic literature of the subject. Let us 
turn back now to far more ancient days, beyond the dawn 
of written history. Let us study ancestor worship in its 
first beginnings, preceding all those notions of religious 
sentiment and worship with which the monuments of the 
great past have made us so familiar. 

That it did actually precede all other kinds of religion 
seems indubitably settled by the archasological discoveries 
of the last few j^^ears. If the picture of the head of an 
elephant slightly engraved upon a blade of ivory, broken 
into five pieces, discovered by Dr Falconer in company 
with MM. Lartet and de Verneuil when they visited 
together the excavations making at the station of La 
Madeleine, Commune of Turzac, in the valley of the Yezere 
at the foot of the chalk cliflPs of Perigord in 1864 proves 
that the aborigines of that part of France were acquainted 



X.] RELIGIOUS WOKSHIP. 259 

with the animal in its living state, although no elephants 
now live in Europe ; — if the bunch of lines descending 
beneath the throat be sufficient evidence that this elephant 
which lived among them was no other than the long- 
haired Mammoth, now entirely extinct, the carcases of 
which however are still preserved in the eternal ice banks 
of the Siberian coast enveloped in the shaggy mantles 
characteristic of the species ; * — if another engraving of 
the head of a true elephant (that is, with almost vertical cra- 
nium) done upon a fragment of reindeer bone, found by M. 
de Vibraye at Laugerie-Basse, a station lower down the 
valley, proves in like manner that the elephant as well as 
the Mammoth lived in France at that remote epoch, spe- 
cifically differing by its narrow oblong ears set forward 
close to the eyef from both the elephant of Africa and the 
elephant of Asia as we know them now ; — if the picture of 
a combat of reindeers (in which the attitude of the con- 
queror is described as of surprising truth) upon a plate of 
shist, with representations of a stag and doe, a horse, an 
ox, an otter, and a beaver, upon other materials, all found 
together by M. de Vibraye in the diggings at Dordogne 
and Charente,J give us all the proof we should require 

• This peculiarity was verified by Mr Adams, in 1799, at the mouth of 
the River Lina. Troyon, p." 74. Comptes rendus de 1' Academic des 
Sciences, Ixi. p. 311. 

f Comptes rendus I'Acad, des Sciences, Ixi, 21 Aout, 1865. The eye 
itself is represented closed by a finely-cut oblique line in its normal po- 
sition. The tusks are represented, and the trunk, rather thin, has a 
length about one and a half that of the head. Were these figures made 
under the influence of a traditional knowledge of the existence of the 
animals in a distant part of the world, chimerical characteristics would be 
apparent, whereas a scrupulous exactness of details has been observed, 
only to be accounted for on the supposition that the model was before 
the artist's eyes. And, of course, all doubt is set aside by the fact of the 
existence of the bones of these auimals found in great numbers. Troyon, 
p. 75. 

X Mortiller, Materiaux, I'^-^'e Annee, p. 109. Troyon I'homme fossile, 
p. 73. I have myself examined a large number of these relics (in 
cast) in the cabinet of my friend Professor Desor, and can vouch for the 
sober truthfulness of the following description of them by Dr Broca; — 
'One can hardly conceive of men, deprived of the use of metal, able to 
fabricate in bone, in ivory, in horn, an infinite variety of tools, extremely 
delicate ; to chisel them into elegant forms, and represent by designs 
graven on the handles of their instruments, figures of various animals ; 
figures which are distinguished by an exactitude and artistic ability truly 
remarkable. To find, in equal measure, the art sentiment we must 



260 



THE FOUR TYPES OF 



[LBCn*. 



Fig. 14. Handle of a Dagger, made of reindeer horn, and reprusenting 
a Falling Deer, found at Langerie Basse, Dordogne, France, 1863. 




X.] RELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 2G1 

apart from the evidence afforded by the bones of the 
animals themselves fossilized in the same localities) that 
they were the contempoi-aries, the prey^ and no doubt 
the dread of the men who sketched their forms ; — if, in a 
wordj such relics of rude skill serve well instead of books 
to inform us under what conditions the early races of man- 
kind protracted their material existence, why should we 
not expect to get equally significant hints respecting their 
intellectual and spiritual state ? 

The question is answered for us by the funerary grotto of 
Aiirignac in the south of France. 

A workman making a terrace for a vineyard, in 1852, 
dug into a talus of loose earth piled against the foot of a 
limestone bluff, and exposed to day a large stone slab set 
upright against a small arched opening penetrating but a 
short distance into the rock. Seventeen human skeletons, 
some mammalian teeth, and eighteen little discs of sea- 
shell pierced as if for wearing round the neck, were super- 
posed upon each other in the little cave. The mayor of 
the canton was a good Christian but a bad ethnologist ; 
and so he gave orders to have the skeletons buried de- 
cently, before any one had a chance to examine them 
anatomically. Philanthropic, but rather stupid that ; con- 
sidering that these were the immortal relics of the Adams 
and Eves of Languedoc : and it was a chance, perhaps 
never to turn up again, for seeing if the story of an Eden 
could be proved or no. The adventure created no great 
excitement, and even the new burying-place of these ante- 
diluvian remains was afterwards forgotten. 

descend innumerable centuries to the best days of Greece. They form a 
contrast with the gross tracery of Celtic monuments so absolute thst, 
perhaps, — it has been suggested — they have been the handiwork of 
modern refugees in the caves of the old troglodytes. But who in Europe, 
since Quaternary times, could design on reindeer bone or horn, the figure 
of an elephant different from all the kinds now living? This interesting 
race led a peaceable existence. A cranium found in the grotto of Bru- 
niquel is distinguished by purity of form, softness of contours, slight pro- 
jection of its apophyses, and shallowness of muscular impressions, — 
features incompatible with the violent manners of a savage race.' lu order 
to assure the reader that there can be no exaggeration in the eulogies be- 
stowed upon these wonderful works of art, 1 have drawn the figure of a 
falliuEi: reindeer, which serves for the handle of a horn dagger, and he may 
judge for himself of the artistic genius \\hich these inhabitants of Gaul, of 
the reindeer age, displayed. See fig. 14. 



262 THE FOUE TYPES OF [lECT, 

In 1860 M. Lartet, unable to recover tlie bodies^ com- 
menced his researches of the cave itself. After the stuff 
from the cliffs which had concealed the mouth of the 
cave had been removed, there remained a terrace standing 
about forty feet above the bed of the valley and level with 
the floor of the grotto. The soil of this terrace and the 
earthy floor of the grotto formed one continuous deposit, 
of variable thickness, but everywhere yielding relics of an 
ancient age, — hearthstones, charred wood and beds of 
cinders, pottery, flint tools and arrow-heads, and burned 
and fractured bones of animals. But mark this difference ! 
All the traces of fire, all the marks of good-table fellow- 
ship, all the proofs of industry, were outside, not inside 
the grotto — in the soil of the terrace, not in the floor-earth 
of the cave. On the other hand, the human skeletons, 
the disjointed necklaces, were found loithin the grotto, 
and nothing of that sort occui'red outside of it. 

No stalactites were visible in this cave, nor the usual 
stalagmite covering to the floor; no traces of the usual 
bone-mud brought by water and enveloping the remains 
as in other ossuary caverns. The earthy deposit seemed 
a bed spread by the hands of man, on which to lay the 
bodies found upon it. It was, to all intents and purposes, 
a cave of Machpelah, an aboriginal mausoleum. 

Outside the cave the friends of the departed had held 
their funereal feasts ; but what were their delicacies ? 
Animals no longer in existence, — the great cave-bear, the 
mammoth, the rhinoceros, the great horned Irish elk, and 
the cave-lion, attesting the immense antiquity of the event. 
The aurochs — now almost extinct — and the reindeer were 
also there. To these were added entremets of smaller crea- 
tures which have escaped extinction and continue to haunt 
our modern woods and fields : the common bear, the 
badger, polecat, wild-cat, wolf and fox, the horse and ass (?), 
the wild boar, common stag and roe buck.* All the 
bones which contained marrow were found broken or split 
lengthwise with a knife. Hyenas^ bones were also found; 
and these foul creatures must have stolen in by night to 
gnaw the relics of the feast, for the transverse marks left 
by their teeth occurred on many of the surfaces, and their 
dung was on the spot. 

* One bone of a hare was also found. 



X] RELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 263 

Inside the cave were also found portions of animal 
skeletons so articulated that it was evident the flesh had 
been upon them when they were deposited. Outside^ the 
remains of ruminants predominated, especially of reindeer 
and of aurochs. Inside, those of carnivorous beasts pre- 
dominated, especially the fox. Some species were only 
represented by their teeth. 

A few more details, and we will be prepared to draw 
conclusions. 

A hundred lamellas of flint, some flakes or chips of flint, 
a kind of hammer, and some nuclei or matrix-blocks, gave 
positive indications that the manufacture of tools and 
weapons was carried on upon the spot ; and, therefore 
that the visit of man to the grotto was not a single and 
incidental event. The bones and horns of the reindeer 
had been utilized for divers instruments, such as awls or 
bodkins, plain (unbarbed) arrow-heads, and whetstones in 
the shape of polished blades. 

The earthy deposit inside the grotto contained with the 
human skeletons teeth of the cave-lion and wild boar, and 
bones of the cave-bear, wolf, fox, horse, aurochs, reindeer, 
and other mammifers, neither broken, gnawed, nor burned. 

The picture of a bird's head was sculptured on the eye- 
tooth of a bear. A. lamella of flint perfectly fresh and 
unused lay near it. The earth that had been thrown out 
of the grotto in a heap upon the terrace at the time 
when the bodies were discovered was carefully searched, 
and furnished a beautiful specimen of worked reindeer- 
horn, and about a hundred worked flints ; many of them 
however so exceedingly minute that it seems impossible 
to imagine them of any practical utility to those who made 
them and placed them with the dead. These were pro- 
bably miniature weapons, such as those small bronze 
swords and spears, an inch or two in length, which are 
often found in the cinerary urns of the north and south 
of Europe. 

In the same heap of dirt coming from the grotto 
were found, naturally enough, other human bones and bones 
of animals, none of which were either gnawed or broken ; 
and several fragments of pottery more or less rudely 
made with the hand ; the only instance on record yet 
in which this art has shown itself to be of an antiquity 



264 THE POUR TYPES OP [lEOT, 

commensurate with tliat of the extinct cave-bear. In all 
other cases where remains of pottery have been dis- 
covered, it has been in ossuary cave-deposits of the latest 
Stone age, i. e. (see page 66) contemporary with the Bos 
primigenius (Urus), long after the total extinction of the 
great cave-bear and large pachyderms, and the retire- 
ment of the reindeer to the polar regions. We must 
keep in mind however here that these other ossuary 
deposits were not composed, as in this case, of dry earth 
shovelled by man^s hand ; but muddy loams distributed 
by water ; and that in such aqueous deposits imburned clay 
potsherds could have stood but little chance of preserva- 
tion. 

What now are our conclusions ? We have here before 
us a terrace and a cave, divided by a door of stone. On 
the terrace traces of active life, a workshop and a table, 
so to speak. In the cave no trace of life, dead bodies 
only, carefully shut in from the assaults of weather and 
wild beasts. The dead were buried then, not burned. 
But more, — arms, ornaments, food, vessels, holding per- 
fumes perhaps or fruits or cakes, were buried then (as in 
so many parts of the world is still the custom to this day) 
together with the dead. 

Those savages believed in immortality ! What was the 
age they lived in ? The most remote of which we have 
as yet any certain information of the existence of mankind 
— unless the reported discoveries of human fossils in the 
tertiary rocks be true — the first of the four established 
epochs of the great Stone age, the epoch of the cave- 
bear, the antique elephant and first rhinoceros ; for the 
bones of this gigantic kind of bear were found not only 
upon the terrace but inside the cave. . 

These funereal fires, these offerings in the tomb, this 
workshop of the travelling equipages of their dead before 
its door, are so many speaking traditions of an ancient, a 
most ancient, a first and altogether aboi-iginal worship of 
the manes of the dead. 

The strangest part of this strange story is, that when 
we turn to look at other funerary grottoes, for there are 
others, caves formed by nature and used for tombs by man, 
we see, first, that they arc of a much later as"e, viz. the 
fourth epoch of the age of Stone, that characterized by the 



?f.] RELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 265 

predominance of the urus bones and domesticated animals ; 
and secondly, we notice in them no traces of funereal 
repasts ; at least none such have been reported or de- 
scribed.* 

Was the worship of the dead abandoned, or forgotten, 
or exchanged for some newer form of religious ceremony 
during this interval? That is hardly a possible suppo- 
sition ; for, as I have shown in previous lectures, Egyptian 
history opens under the auspices of this religious venera- 
tion for the dead ; and the Druid dolmens, cromlechs and 
other structures, now considered as belonging to the lacus- 
trine or fourth epoch of the age of Stone, are all of them 
closely related to views and ceremonies which have the 
same religion for a starting-point. The cave of Aurignac 
stands as a fact so much alone in our present knowledge 
of those distant ages that it would be extremely hazard- 
ous to build any theory upon it involving comparative 
questions. It is very curious however to observe how 
the early sculpture also seems to have disappeared ; for on 
the Druid monuments, and even on the bronze utensils 
and armour of more civilized times — those of the lacustrine 
epoch — we find no pictures of animated nature ; only 
circular and cross-bar patterns of a mathematical character, 
or fanciful arabesque designs. If Troyon be correct in 
ascribing this remarkable abstention to religious prejudices, 
such as those which Moses afterwards established among 
the Jews, and Mahomet among his followers, — then he 
may be equally correct in assigning to the deluge a date 
falling between the third and fourth epochs of the age of 
Stone : that is, following the disappearance of the reindeer 
and previous to the appearance of the present races of 
domesticated animals and plants on European soil, — to a 
deluge which was connected with slow changes of sea- 
level, and the melting of continental glaciers ; to a deluge 
which destroyed, not all indeed, but a large part of the 
previous population, and allowed of a fresh importation 
from the Orient bringing with them an advance in arts 
and arms, domesticated animals, the serial grains and 

• Since tbis ^vas wvil.fen. Mr Djnonthas found a somewhat similar in- 
staiii;e in Beigium. 



266 THE POUR TYPES OF [lECT. 

orcliard trees ; and together Avitli this new social life, a 
more complicated set of religious ideas, among which the 
pure and simple earlier worship of the dead would occupy 
a subordinate and perhaps an insignificant position. 

But it is in vain for us to attempt in this advanced age 
either a defence or a precise definition of the extravagant 
story of the deluge transmitted to us by the Hebrew 
scriptures. M. Troyon^s strong reKgious convictions 
have prevented him from saying in so many words 
that the deluge which he proposes to place between 
the third and fourth Stone age was an almost insensible 
variation of the sea-level, due to the retreat of the glacial 
fields ; but he leaves that inference to be drawn by his 
readers. Such, however, would be no Noachian deluge. 
It would be quite another thing to ascribe the introduction 
of new ideas simply to an amelioration of the post-glacial 
climates and soils of Europe, permitting an influx of an 
advancing population among whom the primitive simplicity 
of ancestral worship had become confused and concealed 
by all those intellectual speculations and social customs 
which Professor Fustel de Coulanges, of Strasbourg, has 
traced backward in the pages of his admirable book, ' La 
Gite Antique.' * 

Whether this new population came from Asia originally 
as the comparative philologists seem to agree in believing, 
or whether it was only reflected from the coasts of Asia 
Minor and Syria like a wave originating in the west or 
south, a view defended by Brugsch in his discussion of 
the seat of the Tahmu race and others affiliated with it 
in the times of Ramses II. 1400 B.c.f ; or lastly, whether 
it came direct from the great centre of Berber or Numidian 
life, by Malta, Sicily and Spain, as Desor and other ex- 
plorers of the Dolmen monuments seem inclined to 
favour, — in any case, such a population, endowed with 
Philistine (Phoenician or Pelasgic) arts and arms, would 
feel themselves no more embarrassed by the aborigines 
whom they found in situ, than the Quakers, Puritans, 
Cavaliers, and Catholics of the British colonies were by 

•Paris, 1864. Reviewed in the Bib. Univ., Lansanne, xxx. No. 118. 
t Geographie der Nachbarlander jEgyptens. 4to. Leipsic, 1858. 



X.] BELIOTOITS WORSHIP. 267 

the red Indians. The one race would disappear slowJy 
before the other without a deluge, or be absorbed into it. 

But the subject of the apparent disappearance of these 
mortuary rites from western Europe beciomes more highly 
complicated when we add to it the equally mysterious dis- 
appearance of all subsequent tracesof that early art which 
has so astonished antiquaries recently, by the admirable 
productions which it left entombed in the caves of Peri- 
gord. ' What ■* asks Dr Broca * ' has become of this in- 
digenous civilization, so original, so different from all we 
know? Did it disappear by slow modifications ? No; it 
vanished suddenly, leaving no trace behind, and everything 
permits us to believe by force. Following it without transi- 
tion we can discover nothing but the imprints of a powerful, 
religious, warlike race equipped with a perfected armour 
and knowing how to polish silex, but otherwise not dis- 
posed to industry, and total strangers to all art sentiment. 
Sufficient indication of a brutal and conquering invasion ! 
The cave-dwellers of the age of Stone, who had acquired 
the mastery of the soil, and had succeeded in extirpating 
the last of the great mammifers of the Quaternary fauna, 
did not know enough to defend themselves against the 
irruption of barbarians ; and so we see a sort oi fre-hhtovie 
Middle Ages intervene, succeeding to beautiful days of a 
more ancient premature civilization, the origin of which is 
as yet entirely unknown.' But probably these people of 
the reindeer sculpture, so advanced in some respects, were 
merely the somewhat softened and polished offspring of 
the ruder savages of the epoch of the old diluvium. In 
more than one cavern the lower layers of the soil contain 
rhinoceros and mammoth, while the upper hold only rein- 
deer bones. The flints of the second epoch were worked 
by simple percussion precisely like those of the first epoch, 
only that the flakes were smaller, and therefore the work 
finer. No rubbing was employed in either. The knives 
of both epochs are precisely alike. We may then conclude 
from the sculptures of the reindeer cave-men of Perigord 
that the still more ancient cave-hear people of the grotto of 
Aurignac had begun to make designs. One such, in fact, 

* Address before the Anthropological Society, Hist, des Travaux de 
1855-6. 



268 THE FOUR TYPES OP [lECT. 

has been discovered by M. Garrigou, in anotlier Pyrenean 
caye — a pebble, on which are cut the outlines of a bear.* 

It woula seeni m fact impossible for a race, however 
low m mental capacity, to continue for many generations 
pecking away at flint nodules to make weapons, and at 
marrow-bones to obtain food, without developing ideas of 
form and the desire of producing them at will. Just so 
the ceremonial rites of interment must have grown up 
slowly from the m.ost imperfect and accidental beginnings ; 
and any ideas of a hereafter must have been educed by 
chance from the accidents of life, through the religious 
faculty ; just as accidental likenesses in stones and bones, 
and chance marks which were made on them by human 
teeth and flint knives, must have provoked the artistic 
faculty to rouse itself to attempt esthetic shapes. 

All this was consistent with the lowest grades of 
savagery. I have said in a former lecture f that all 
evidence is against the cannibalism of the Scandinavian 
aborigines. But in other regions cannibalism, may have 
prevailed. The subject has become lately a favourite and 
fruitful theme of discussion; and the evidence against the 
aborigines is growing formidable. At the recent festival at 
Salisbury in honour of the opening of the new Museum 
of archseological relics Dr Thurnam read a paper on the 
round-head people of the round barrows (corresponding to 
the hugelgrdher of Germany), and the long-headed people 
of the long barrows (reihen grcvber) . He asserted the priority 
of the latter and their evident addiction to human sacri- 
fices. Mr Stevens stated that the human bones found in 
the pit-dwellings lately opened at Fullerton were all split 
and broken like those of the animals with which they were 
found. In the Belgian caves the same fact has been re- 
marked. M. Garrigou (and M. Roujou also) has exhibited 
human bones from the Pyrenean caves on which exist 
marks of methodical percussion, intended for opening the 
medullary canal. Dr Clement, of St Aubin in Canton 
Neuchatel, has found the arm-bone of a boy with numer- 
ous pointed teeth- marks on its sides and ends. 

War is the normal social state of all savages ; war with 

* ' Which by the length of its cervical spiny apophyses resembles more 
the cave-bear than any other known species.' 
t Pages 130, 131. 



X.] RELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 269 

the beasts, war with encroaching clans. Their style of 
war was to be crafty, treacherous, and consequently cruel. 
The growth of religious ideas once introducing sacrifices, 
war offers human victims, and hunger baits the temptation 
sooner or later, which when yielded to, becomes a habit ; 
and habits are hereditary. The traces of this custom 
are visible in the most civilized nations of antiquity. 
In Rome and Greece locks of human hair were laid upon 
the altar. Human effigies, built up of rushes, were on 
certain occasions solemnly thrown into the Tiber. Mr 
Blyth thinks that the same explanation will suit for the 
red powder which the Hindoos throw about upon each 
other in their religious festivals. 

But whether flowers, or food, or incense, or ornaments 
and arms, or horses and slaves, or hecatombs of captured 
enemies were offered in the sacrifices of the advancing 
ages — all these rites, however beautiful some, however 
horrible others, were but the many-sided aspects of one 
aboriginal idea, the primitive religion of mankind, the 
pure and simple worship of the dead. 

I have said the pure and simple worship of the dead. 
What, then, was the aboriginal savage^s idea of immortality ? 
A life beyond the grave ; no more, no less. How then 
did it differ from the Egyptian, Greek, and Roman ideas of 
the state of the departed ; and from that faith which the 
Christian casts as his anchor into Heaven ? 

All things are valued by relationships. A life this side 
the grave cannot be the same for any two living beings ; 
how can the life yon side be other than most manifold ? 
And its idea, if not mere book-lore, must be likewise mani- 
fold. The Bgjrptian's eternal mansion was a combination 
of Palace hall and Parisian restaurant. The Greek of 
Homer's day anticipated an Elysium such as Ossian sang. 
The artists and philosophers of the Empire half believed 
in a Hades of pensive, ennuied, gentle, garrulous and re- 
gretful shadows, such as Dante has described, and Bocca- 
cio's ' Decameron ' embodies in more earthly substantiality. 
The savage knew nothing of life but its wants and woes, 
its haggard forests, death chills, demon-like wild beasts, 
famines, incurable diseases; what cuuid nis faith in im- 
mortality do for his hooped and shackled nature ? His 



270 THE FOUR TYPES OP [lECT. 

worship of" the dead was but the germ of a relifrion^ a iner<^ 
instinct of his animal affections — nothing move. 

The heaven of the Christian is a blinding reflection 
from the skies of all the beauties and sublimities that the 
eye of the poet has seen upon the earth ; of all the sweet- 
ness of this life that the heart of parent and lover has ever 
tasted; of all those sun-lit regions of science which the 
latest civilizations have conquered and possessed. The 
immortality of the ancients was the immortality of the 
dead^ with their faces always turned regretfully towards 
the life that they had lost^ because it was real life ; while 
their immortality was but an eternal deaths without an 
object and without activity. Jesus came and stood and 
said_, ' God is not the God of the dead^ but of the living ; ' 
therefore we say of Him that ' He brought a living immor- 
tality to light. ■* 

Yet after all^ the Christian religion is but the ancient 
worship of the dead, sublimated^ glorified^ intensified, 
made more concrete in its objects and details^ and con- 
centrated upon one figure around which all its ceremonial 
is grouped. 

II. The second type of religion is that of the worship oi 
the powers of nature. Fetichism is its lowest form ; 
astrology and fire-worship its highest forms ; but in every 
aspect its essential nature consists in the worship of the 
material parts of the worlds under the false impression 
that they possess powers which they do not. This ought 
to be distinctly understood. There is a true and reason- 
able worship of the powers of nature^ which regards their 
just sublimities^ loves and i^espects their concurrent har- 
monies, burns with a grateful sense of their blessed in- 
fluences on the life of man^ and shudders at the imagination 
of disasters which the understanding can explain and even 
sometimes can predict but not prevent, nor even yet per- 
haps escape from. 

But a Fetich is a natural object superstitiously beloved 
or feared because supposed to possess unknown, peculiar, 
or magical powers. A fetich is a thing personified by 
ignorant people so as to be considered able to act — 1. volun- 
tarily ; 2. under the influence of a kind or unkind feelm<r 
towards man ; and 3. with some other kind of power thnii 
its nature would suggest. 



X.] KBLIGIOUS WORSHIP. 271 

The earliest FetickeSj no doubt, were stones and sticks. 

A stone, for instance, lias the power to lie still where it 
IS put, but not to get up of itself; it can roll down-hill, 
but not up-hill. Imagine our horror at seeing a rock slowly 
and deliberately rolling itself to the top of a hill ! or an 
Alpine aiguille nodding to us and standing again erect ! 
Yet that is the horror of the fetich. One of the most 
elFective scenes in the spurious continuation of Bunyan^'s 
Pilgrim^s Progress is . that where the wretched man is 
hurried off by demons towards the mouth of the pit, while 
all the trees along the road-side draw back their branches 
from his despairing grasp except two twigs, which merci- 
fully advance themselves, and by which he holds on and is 
saved. Amadis de Gaul and all the romance literature of 
the days of chivalry abounds in this conception by the 
imagination of a voluntary, kind or malignant, power, 
resident in things. It is the characteristic of our dream 
life ; it makes nightmare nightmare. It characterizes all 
child life. It makes itself dominant not only over the 
savage population of the globe, but over the most culti- 
vated minds at special times, and in respect to special 
things. I have known a well-balanced mind, set free from 
all superstitions but one, ascribe a prophetic power of mis- 
chief to broken glass. I have heard the most enlightened 
and liberalized people confess to a superstitious faith in 
those charming fetiches the precious gems; and in- 
numerable are the beautiful legends on record respecting 
their magical powers. I have myself worn for four years 
an amulet which no money would buy; and since I have 
worn it my life has been most prosperous. I will show it 
to. you — it is the nail on which John Brown hung up his 
coat and hat all the time he was incarcei'ated in Charles - 
town jail. A friend of mine, a brigade surgeon in General 
Patterson^s army, the first man who entered the cell when 
our troops occupied the place (in 1861), looking round the 
room saw nothing he could bring away for me but this 
one nail, which the jailor told him had been thus used, — I 
hope it is my only fetich. 

What married woman in this audience of Boston Illumi- 
natse would not feel heart-sick with a nameless premoni- 
tion of impending evil if her wedding-ring should snap 
asunder ? That is her fetich. When the sword fell from 



272 THE FOUE TYPES OF [lECT. 

the castle-wall, tlie senesclial never thought of ascribing it 
to the fatigue of leather , but to a voluntary ability in the 
sword itself to sound an alarm of danger to the noble 
house of whose possessions it had been both grantor and 
guarantee. 

It is impossible to enumerate the instances of existing 
fetich worship in the uncultivated world. The worship of 
the horse-shoe is still almost universal; I may explain its 
origin hereafter. So is the observance of the divining 
rod , which has a similar origin. Of ten or twelve thou- 
sand wells bored during the last eight years in the Venango 
county oil-region in Pennsylvania a thousand (more or 
less) were located by diviners with a divining rod; or 
with a pendulum made of a deerskin bag enclosing a ball 
of musk ; or by spiritualists falling into trances and exe- 
cuting spasmodic evolutions when they felt the influence 
of the spot to be selected. There is a popular lecturer 
on geology whose wife practises the profession of a 
spiritual explorer by help of this kind of fetich. The 
other day she held a piece of antimony ore to her forehead 
and immediately fell into a rhapsodical description of a 
charming lake-country, in Canada, through which the 
vein of that ore runs. I have seen shafts sunk after silver 
in the glades of Somerset county, Pennsylvania, under the 
dictation of an old scamp who would lay in his hunting 
cap a small looking-glass which had cabalistic characters 
on the back of it and was called an erdspiegel ; and then 
hiding his own face over it he would describe the depth 
exactly to an inch of all the mineral wonders that he saw 
beneath the surface. So strongly did the imagination of 
this fetich act upon his workmen, simple old German 
immigrants from the mother-land of superstition as they 
were, that they affirmed with all their faith that when at 
work at the bottom of their shaft they could distinctly hear 
invisible agents laughing, talking, pounding, picking be- 
neath their feet, removing the treasure downward out of 
reach ; for of course they never found it. 

Now if all this and a thousand times more of it be 
possible in our day, in this fresh land of honest, open work, 
compelling nature to say all and no more than what she 
knows — to do all and no more than what she has the 
power to do ; leaving no hole or corner of the globe an 



X.] EELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 273 

unexplored retreat of the mysterious ; witli libraries full of 
demonstrations of the exact ability of every created agency 
to harm or heal ns ; with public schools to save our sons 
and daughters from the ineradicable first infection of this 
superstition of the fetich_, how overwhelming a deluge of 
it must have submerged the early souls of men ; those 
hapless savages who trembled at every leaf-fall and fled 
with averted faces from every natural object a httle out of 
the ordinary shape.* What more inevitable than that 
such shapes as isolated pillars of rock^, stones curiously 
perched on peaks and movable by the hand^s touchy and 
ambrose stones^ cheese-rings, boulders in river currents, 
labyrinthine caves and horrid clefts between high crags, 
made grandly vocal with the voice of cataracts and with 
the awful roar of beasts ; what more inevitable than that 
these objects of nature should come to be feared and 
worshipped ? t 

This was sure to be the case when they imitated even 
in the least degree the forms of man or beast. Such a 
pillar of red saliferous sandstone capped by a fragment of 
a layer of white limestone as the traveller may see stand- 
ing half way up the mountain side and overlooking the west 
shore of the Dead Sea, was sure to have some horrible 
Lot's-wife legend attached to it. Two months ago as I 
passed along the southern shore of the Grulf of St Law- 
rence, rounding the point of Gaspe, I saw a rock called the 
Old Man, and was told that some few years ago another 
stood beside it called the Old Woman, but the surf had 
carried that away. The ocean is a great artificer of such 
rude effigies, making and breaking them wherever there 
are suitable rocks on any coast. And the ancient savages 
were fishermen, and lived upon the coast, and sailed 
among these cliflPs ; and many a father's dead body was 
found near some remarkable rock, which grew to be the 
special object of his children's reverence ; and many a 
legend of dead warriors got mingled up with new-formed 

• See ^ood instances mentioned by Livingstone. 

f See m ' Harper ' of November the account of the Indian worship of 
Mount Popocatapetl, 'the smoking mountain.' See the picture and 
description of Mount Barkal, in Upper Egypt, by Lepsius, Reise. See 
also -the views of the cleft mountain behind Delphi, in Greece, and the 
cleft rock in front of the temple of Philoe. 

18 



274 THE rouK TYPES OP [lect. 

prodigies of tlie erosive powers of tlie sea; transitions 
from ancestor worsliip to feticli worship, and mixtures of 
the two. In tliis way we can explain the frequency o 
legends of animated stones, and human beings turned tc 
stones, and in fact all the phenomena of early idolatry, 
together with that other class of legends wherein trees are 
substituted for rocks, maidens changed into laurel and 
myrtle and cypress, spirits confined in oaks, and the whole 
range of similar superstitions. But I shall show you 
hereafter that even for these superstitions there was a solid 
historical basis, apart from all disposition in the human 
imagination to personify and deify or diabolize the benefi- 
cent and noxious qualities of natural things. We must 
never forget that Druid priests lived under oaks, and their 
spirits were supposed to haunt them afterwards. The 
hunter who fell from the rock was supposed to become 
identified \yith the rock. Superstition acts upon material 
objects to convert them into fetiches just as heat acts upon 
a bar of iron to make of it a magnet. It was not the height 
of the rocky summit that evoked the savage's devotion, 
but the remembrance of some salvation there ; it was his 
Ararat. It was not the tickled fancy which grew reverent 
before the natural rocking-stone. It was its unaccountable 
and imposing resemblance to the boat which had been to 
his race both mother and father in one — obtaining for him 
food in life, saving him in storms from death, and furnish- 
ing him with a burial-place — that made him reverent. 

But the intellectual ground of fetich worship is now, and 
always has been, ignorance of natural history. The feticli 
is the first physical object which strikes the bewildered eye 
as wanting its own explanation. In this sense the range 
of the fetich is immense. It is not confined to sticks and 
stones. It ascends to the platform of classic art. The 
Greek priests made their statues live and move and speak 
and weep, as Romish priests do now. Memnon's statue 
with its sunrise music was a splendid fetich. 

We can ascend still higher. I have mentioned the wor- 
ship of gems, endowed with superhuman intelligence. 
But there is a far more refined fetichism than that. The 
whole system of the Cabala is built upon it. In ancient 
times extraordinary powers were assigned to words and 
numbers. They were treated as entities, powerful entities. 



X.] RELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 276 

You know how full the stories of tlie Thousand Nights are 
of this. The name of Solomon was the most powerful of 
all fetiches. He who could speak it rightly . could bind 
and loose spirits, fly like a bird, and in fact command all 
the powers of nature. The King of the Genii was confined 
thousands of years in a casket merely because Solomon^ s 
seal was upon it. The story has been repeated in many 
forms. Asmodeus was thus shut up in a modern magi- 
cian's phial. No satisfactory explanation of this class of 
superstitions has ever been published, to my knowledge. 
It must have some basis in real life. Primal error, which 
is a nothing, cannot bear fruit. The Pythagorean system 
of Philosophy turned on the magic powers of numbers. 
There is a great disposition in the human mind to dwell on 
coincidences. We are fascinated by the magic square, for 
instance, which adds up the same in all directions. I was 
once introduced to a learned Rabbinical scholar living in 
Berlin. His room was so full of tobacco smoke when I 
entered it that I could hardly discern his form at the far end. 
But I soon found that his head was so much fuller of tal- 
mudic and cabalistic lore that it was impossible to see any " 
truth through that fog. He assured me that there was such 
power in a name, that the moment of the christening of a 
child was the most solemn and sublime of all the moments 
in his history. For as he was named so he became. The 
name had the power of destiny, and involved in its own 
letters all the events of that child's existence. 

Now how could such a curious system of fetichism 
arise ? I have given you the explanation, in part, in my 
lecture on the alphabet. The letters of a name are sym- 
bohc ; their conjunction was cabalistic. But fully to com- 
prehend the importance of a word to the old nations, one 
must imagine for himself the rise of the secret priesthoods, 
the sacred mysteries, the freemasonries with their signs and 
pass words.* Solomon was the representative Cell Man, 
or Cabalist, head of all the orders of freemasons clerical 
and lay, so to speak, that have ever existed.f His name 

* *im DaBaR, Hebrew, a word, is the same as '-o-x DeBiR, the taber- 
nacle of Jehovah. 

t Solomon, Shalmanezer, Carloman, Charlemagne, such names are may- 
poles upon which have been hung all the garlands of mythology, for the 
nations to dance around. Solomon calls himself (if he wrote the book) 



276 THE FOUE TYPES OP [lBCT» 

•was, in fact, the embodied idea of the Mystery ; it stood 
for the whole body of occult lore. But it therefore stood 
for the whole political power of the initiated classes. Its 
use by any man was a guarantee of his good standing in 
the society^ of responsibility as a messenger, of authority 
as an agent. All the spirits of the throne and the pulpit, 
the work-bench and the writing-table, were obedient to it. 
Hence, legends like that of Prospero and Ariel; Faust 
and Mephistopheles ; Friar Bacon and Father Bungay; 
legends so devised as to conceal the real spirits^ the real 
magicians, and the real words-of-command j but legends 
which, doing this work for their inventors,, did also another 
for themselves, infused into the common people of every 
race a fresh a ad more subtle spirit of mystic fetichis7)i, so 
penetrating and intangible in its character that the wisest, 
most learned, and most holy men of modern times have 
not escaped its influence. For, 

One step more, and we reach the highest grade of 
fetichism , rising insensibly from all before described. 
What is an orthodox creed, but a mystic word-fetich ? 
Look at the wafer elevated by the Romish priest in the 
sacrifice of the mass as a piece of God-man — thousands 
prostrate before it, not daring even to look at it, so awful 
is their dread of its power to bless them and to curse 
them, to annihilate them instantly ! Yet that is merely a 
thing-fetich. Look now at that dogma elevated by the 
Protestant preacher before the logical understanding of 
his audience, whose souls lie prostrate in the dust before 
it, not daring to use their reason on it, or to look it for a 
moment in the face, believing, as they must that to doubt 
it is to be damned ! That is a word-fetich. 

What is the school of Gaussen and Hengstenberg 
among theologians but a sect of Christianity retiring 
from the noble reverence and practice of the Spirit of 
Christ and his apostles and from the sublime conceptions 
of the Hebrew poets and dropping backward and down- 
ward on to the ground of literal fetichism ; worshipping 

in the beginning of Ecclesiastes, the Cabalist, or quelt (n'pp,) which our 
translators have rendered preacher, without knowing that to preach = to 
hark, i. e. to speak oracularly (Arkitely) ; as, to fray = to bray ; and as, 
to gabble, or talk gibberish = to gobble, i, e. to speak cabalistically, or in 
a manner unintelligible to the uninitiated or common people. 



X.] RELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 277 

the letter wliichj Christ says it^ must kill ; and converting 
the literature of all the Hebrew ages from David and Solo- 
mon to James and John into a gilt-edged quarto bound in 
calf; putting a more fatal stop to the progress of the Chris- 
tian Church towards its millennial purity than ever did the 
golden calf which arrested the progress of Israel into their 
promised land ! There are multitudes of Christians living 
now who entertain so strongly the old Jewish reverence 
for the word Jehovah that they bring themselves to pro- 
nounce it only with a strenuous effort of the reason and the 
will combined. It is not simply from reverence for the in- 
finite God whose special name it is supposed to be — but 
reverence for the word ; because it was for ages one of the 
great world-fetiches and called 'the unpronounceable.'' 
Laymen had no right to take it on their lips. It was a 
privilege of clergy. It was fetich — or tabu — for the out- 
side masses. Why ? Because it lay at the heart of the 
special religious system of the Hebrews : because it was 
the supposed formula of Unitarian doctrine as opposed to 
all idolatry ; because it was translated ' the living God ' 
and itself shared a sort of weird life ; because it was the 
word-temple in which dwelt the shekinah of all transcend- 
ental science ; veiled^ but ready to break forth in fire and 
light ; veiled like Isisj but before which the initiated priests 
might. worship trembling and alone. It was^ therefore, to 
the ancient Jew, and still is to the devout but superstitious 
Christian, an awful silent logos. 

In a still more distant east we have another instance of 
an unpronounceable word, a fetich formula, the key to the 
mysteries of another system of religious worship : I refer 
of course to the sacred syllable ATTM of the Brahmans. It 
is said to be of no known specific meaning, but to involve 
in some way the idea of the Trinity. Now we know what 
the Hindu trinity is : Brahma, Vishnu, Siva ; the maker, 
preserver, destroyer. But why these three are so related 
to each other and to human history, or how they can be 
distinguished by the letters A U M (or any other mode of 
spelling OM), has not been clearly stated ; nor can I venture 
to demand your long attention this evening to what I 
would consider the true demonstration of the curious 
problem. I should make it on Arkite grounds ; by which. 
I mean that the word itself, as pronounced, has always 



278 THE POUK TYPES Of [lBCT. 

been the symbol of Arkite mystery, secrecy, and irdtiation ; 
being tbe representative of tlie roar or murmur of tlie 
great deep. Mim is tlie Hebrew name for tbe waters of 
the sea.* Amim is the Hebrew name for multitudes of 
peoples, the roar of wbicb goes up as the voice of many 
waters. I have shown you that the shape of the letter M 
was obtained from the water-waved surface of the sea. 
You are all probably sufficiently acquainted with the 
pictures of the Hindu pantheon to recognize in Vishnu 
the Fish-Noah, or god of the waters, sleeping upon a coiled 
serpent, the symbol of water, and representing the pre- 
serving genius of the ark. Brahma as the father-creator 
represents the genius of the mountain. And Siva, the 
destroyer, his name being identical with the Typhon of 
the west, represents the devouring deluge. Then, al- 
though the three letters A TJ M are of western form, and 
the analogous Sanscrit letters have been so changed as to 
conceal their old meanings, the identity of the A with Brah- 
ma, TT with Vishnu, and M with Siva, follows as a matter 
of course ; and there is no longer any wonder that this 
Om is too dreadful a fetich to be pronounced, and too 
sacred to be taught by any Brahman to a man of any 
other caste. And yet in spite of the prohibition it has 
escaped. It leaked out into many languages in the earliest 
times. It formed part of many of the most sacred western 
words ; such as. Omphalos, the navel, a name for the 
Delphic oracle; Triomphe, the cry or watchword of the 
priests of Bacchus; umber and imber, darkness and storm; 
amber,f the precious electron found floating on the waves. 
The Ldsh Druids called by this name, Omh,J the living 
God, and defined its meaning ' He who is.-* There is very 
little doubt that it is the Ob or spirit of divination men- 
tioned in the Hebrew scriptures, and the Obi or necro- 
mantic power of the blacks of Western Africa. It is not 

* Egyptian ham-ham, to roar (Bunsen, vol. i. p. 462) ; Coptic 
kem-kem, to roai , hm, to fish, p. 463 ; mhi, to draw water, p. 469 ; mah, 
water (Bunsen cites Leemans, viii. xiv. xvi. for this, on p. 468). 

f ^m, Egyptian, gem or pearl. Bunsen, p. 455 (Coptic ana-met), and 
anm (p. 456). — 

J Cf. Amn, Egyptian name of Jupiter, Coptic amoun ; and also the Egyp • 
tian verb, to conceal ; Coptic amoni. Compare with this the Amen of the 
Hebrew, and the Egyptian ma (Coptic me, met), truth, true. Cf. also 
amut (Coptic amen-t). Hades ; and am-t (cf. ouom), devourer. 



X.] EELiaiOUS WOESHIP. 279 

impossible that it occurs in sncli modern words as humhifg; 
for the second syllable of that word is undoubtedly (like 
bugger, and bugaboo) the Scythian hog, once meaning 
god (Bacchus) and now devil. It probably occurs in our 
word Unvpire, or judge in equity, but refers in this case 
not to the man, but to the bar or court whose laws he 
but administered. 

The unpronounceable divine name among the Hebrews is 
perhaps the best introduction we could have to the history 
of the third type of religious worship which I have now 
to describe. 

m. The worship of the gods in heaven. 

You may remember that our first type of religion in- 
volved the worship which the early inhabitants of the 
earth paid, and many of its present inhabitants still pay to 
their dead parents and ancestors. The second type of 
religion, the last described, coeval in its origin and co- 
extensive in its duration with the first, was fetichism, the 
worship of the powers of nature as expressed unintel- 
ligibly or magically in the objects of sense — mountains and 
seas, rocks and trees, sounds in the air, works of art, and 
words and creeds constructed by the priests. 

Now the third type of religion is the worship of the 
invisible God as a creator, preserver, benefactor, and judge. 

It has been the central question of all critical theology 
how this religious conception was generated in the soul 
of man. Was it aboriginal ? Or has it been developed 
gradually by civilization ? Was it revealed at first ? Or did 
it reside as an innate co-essential germ of intelligence in the 
human intellect as such ? Was it the common property of 
the earliest people and afterwards lost amid the sins and 
miseries of migrating races, enslaved races, isolated races, 
perishing races ? Or was it committed as a sacred and 
peculiar privilege to one chosen people for safe keeping 
until the fulness of times had come and the Son of God 
was revealed and the new dispensation was inaugurated 
and the apostles were sent forth to fill the earth with the light 
and warmth of that ' life eternal, which is the knowledge 
of the true God, and of Jesus Christ whom he hath sent.'' 

Of these theories, the last is held to be the true one by 
orthodox Christians, But it is opposed in many points to 
the results of that criticism of the religious history of man- 



280 THE FOUR TYPES OF [lBCT. 

kind wMcli tlie modern sciences have forced the honest 
seekers after truth to undertake. Of course I will not 
have time this evening to pursue the discussion far. But 
I must at least point out the place where men of science 
stand to view the rise of the divine idea in man — that 
glorious sunrise of the soul — the only sunrise in the 
history of mankind: 

The idea of an invisible God finds its only analogy in 
the knowledge which the domestic relations give to chil- 
dren of their parents. It is reasonable therefore^ that it 
sprang as a natural development out of the worship of 
dead ancestors. If the idea of God be that of a being 
invisible^ creative^ provident^ protective and judicial, it 
differs in no respect from a combination of the two ideas 
of a living father, and a father who has entered his eternal 
mansion. Do you object, however, that the idea of God is 
far grander ? I grant it : but that is a matter of degrees. 
The definition of the young minister which took by storm 
the sufirages of the Assembly of the Westminster Divines : 
— ' God is a spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his 
being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and 
truth,' was the glorious consummation of all the religious 
feeling and reasoning of all ages — the flower of human 
thought, ripened in the choicest soil of the last deposits of 
the waters of civilization. Wisdom, power, justness, 
goodness, truth ! What are these but human attributes 
on which the whole superstructure of ancestor worship 
has been built ? But the three epithets. Infinite, Eternal, 
and Unchangeable, are transcendental ideas, evolved by 
science ; abstractions, only possible to well-formed, well- 
bred brains; enlargements of the savage notion of a 
father's character by civilized thinkers whose material 
horizon has been widened by travel ; whose astronomy has 
changed its starry firmament into realms of interstellar 
space; whose lives of leisure have allowed free scope for 
poetry as well as practice ; and made love, not fear, the 
law of thought. Love is, like heat, the great expander. 
God is a product of philanthropy.* The shivering, 

* Benevolence is an unknown instinct in the lower animals until they 
are domesticated with mankind ; for their love of offspring is not only 
selfish, but provisional, and in all its exhibitions savage and cruel. Bene- 
volence is foreign also to the animal part of man's economy; the 



X.] RELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 281 

hungry, timorous savage of the earliest days had not 
enough of love about his house to make a small- sized god 
of. Infinite ! Eternal ! Unchangeable ! Men could begin 
to comprehend such epithets — to invent them rudely I 
should rather say — ^when they began to build pyramids and 
' eternal mansions ' for their departed great : but not 
before. 

We find, therefore, no trace of our idea of Deity in the 
earliest history of mankind. The Hebrew writers report 
indeed such traces ; but their reports are not evidence 
because not contemporary. They only go to show what 
was the idea of God among the Jews after the times of 
David, subsequent to whom all their Scriptures seem to 
have been written. Or, if the earlier books should be 
considered as compilations from fragments of an older 
time — an opinion now placed almost above discussion — 
such fragments prove, not that our idea of God existed at 
the beginning of history, but, on the contrary, that it did 
not so exist. Tou will find an admirable resurri'^ of the 
evidence of the truth of this statement in Chapter V. of a 
book by William Eathbone Greg, entitled Creed of 
Christendom. Tou need, however, merely refresh your 
biblical memories, and recall a few texts, to see at once 
that the common notion of a special revelation to the 
Jews as a peculiar people of the fact of the existence of 
One God has no foundation whatever. 

Milman and others speak of the pure monotheism of the 
Jews as a singular phenomenon, confined to the narrow 
strip of land called Palestine, where ' the worship of one 
Almighty Creator of the universe subsisted as its only 
sanctuary, and where, in every stage of society, under the 
pastoral tent of Abraham, and in the sumptuous temple of 
Solomon, the same creed maintained its inviolable sim- 

storaach laughs at it ; but the savage is little else than a reasoning 
stomuch ; he immolates his parents, and exposes his children, when they 
cease to benefit his own life, or gratify his own desires. Benevolence did 
not enter — could not enter into the early idea of a God. The Hebrew 
Jehovah is a selfish personage. The Christian God is Love itself. It is 
not made out whether good is from god, or god from good ; or whether 
indeed there is any direct connection between these words. 



282 THE FOUR TYPES OP [lECT. 

plicity/* No ! Their own writings show that they were 
incessantly and unconquerably idolatrous. No punish- 
ments could cure them. The High Priest of Jehovah 
is described as worshipping the Egyptian Apis while 
Jehovah was thundering his law to this high priest's 
brother on the top of the mountain before their eyes. 
And when that law came down in his hands^ it contained 
no notice of the doctrine of an only true God. Its first 
commandment merely forbade the people to whom it was 
sent from worshipping any other than their own God. 

The fact is evident^ that Jehovah was the family God of 
the Abrahamidas ; and therefore became subsequently the 
national God of the Hebrews. I do not mean by this, a 
family god in the sense of the ancestor worsliip ; but a 
god considered by the Hebrew progenitors of David and 
Solomon^ whoever they were^ as the lar or haijicnv of their 
house. It looks as if it were an adopted deity^ adopted 
by the Hebrews (if they were Hyksos) from the Egyptian 
NUK PU NXJKj the ' unknown God/ the male Isis^ whose 
veil could not be raised ; the god who refused to tell his 
worshippers his name ; a name in fact in process of in- 
vention. The story reads that this God called Abram out 
of TJr of the Chaldees ; of course the call came from the 
God at his own home — in Palestine ; he was a western 
deity. The story says that Abram's parents worshipped 
other gods (although in Gen. xxxi. 53, we read, Hhe God 
of Abraham, the God of Nachor, the God of their fathers 
judge betwixt us' !), and that his children's cousins at the 
old eastern homestead continued to do so afterwards. The 
Jehovah was evidently a western deity. His other Hebrew 
name, Adonai, shows this still more plainly ; for it is the 
Adonis of the Syrian worship, and was introduced into 
the pantheon of Egypt by Amenoph IV. a Pharaoh of the 
18th dynasty, who took this God's name instead of Am- 
nion's in his own, calling himself no longer Aynen-o^h, but 
Khou-en-Aten, or the splendour of the solar disc. Aten, 
' the radiant disc,' was then the Syrian Baal- Adonis, intro- 
duced into Egypt by the Hyksos of the previous (17th) 
dynasty, under the name of Sutech. How it happened that 
a native Pharaoh, a lineal descendant of Amosis, the ex- 

• Hiat. Jews, i. 4. 



X.] RELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 283 

peller of tlie Hyksos (through. Amenoph I., Thoutmes I. 
and III., Amenoph II., Thoutmes IV., and Amenoph 
III.), should forsake Ammon, persecute the old Egyptian 
ceremonial, and become a fanatical propagandist of a 
special form of Hyksos-Shemite faith, can only be ex- 
plained by reference to the fact that his mother was a 
foreigner. Her pictures at Tel-Amarna have rose-coloured 
(i. e. northern- coloured) flesh. His own most extraor- 
dinary profile hints at a strange and tragic family origin ; 
while similarly strange-faced priests standing around his 
figure at the altar, on the monuments, intimate that his 
reign was a temporary revolution in favour of the only 
half-expelled and half-suppressed Hyksos population of the 
Delta — a momentary triumph of that worship, every trace of 
which the next Pharaoh (Horus) did his best to obliterate ; 
but which still survived in secret under his successor 
Seti I., the founder of the 19th dynasty, and then 
was re-established as the worship of Seth by the great 
Ramses II. and his unfortunate son Menephtha, the so- 
called Pharaoh of the Exodus. 

Thus a direct connection is established between the 
Mosaic worship of Jehovah-Adonai, the Hyksos worship 
of Seth-Aten, and the later Israelitish worship of Baal- 
Adonis j and any noble character discoverable in the first 
must be related to what natural refinements the already 
long-existing civilizations of those countries had already 
been enabled to produce. In later times we are express- 
ly told that the Jews of the twelve tribes worshipped 
Jehovah and Baal together. 

But not to hurry on too fast, let us remount from the 
19th to the 1 2th dynasty, and return from Moses to 
Abraham; for men's ideas are wonderfully changed in 
fifteen hundred years, or even in five hundred, to take the 
Hebrew chronology for our guide. 

The legends of Abram's God Jehovah exhibit him to us 
in the most anthropomorphic garb — the least spiritual and 
Christian possible. He sits with Abraham at the door of 
his tent. He eats with him ; getting into an angry alter- • 
cation with Sarah, the patriarch's old wife. He discusses 
with him the case of Sodom and Gomorrah; informing 
Mm that he was on his way thither to see if the reports he 
liad heard of their wickedness were correct. 



284 THE POUR TYPES OP [LBCT. 

The legends of Isaac and Jacob are equally explicit and 
compromising to tlie god they praise. They describe 
Jacobus family as idolaters^ and Jacob himself as only 
gathering their idols together and hiding them under an 
oak (Gen. xxxv. 2 — 4) when he approached the domain of 
his western family deity. They tell a story of the cun- 
ning fellow regularly bargaining with Jehovah to take 
him for his God on certain conditions^ and promising a 
tithe of his possessions if Jehovah would fulfil his part of 
the contract (Gen. xxviii. 20). To whom the tithes were 
to be paid, or for what end, is not stated ; but this mention 
of an arrangement of tithes betrays the late date of the 
history in which the story occm-s. 

It was not until the Abrahamidas came in contact with the 
civilization of Egypt that we begin to see any tendency of 
their Jehovah worship to rise to a higher intellectual level. 
Moses — a character representing the New Egyptian phase 
of Hebrew (or Hyksos ?) life — takes one great step in ad- 
vance of his forerunners. But even Moses makes no claim 
of sole existence for his nation''s deity ; but only insists 
that he is superior to all other gods ; the Jehovah Elohim, 
Lord of lords, and God of gods. 

In Exodus XV. 11, he is made to say, ''Who is like thee, 
O Jehovah, among the gods?' He is always represented 
as speaking to Pharaoh of Jehovah not as Supreme Ruler 
of heaven and earth, but as the God of the Hebrews ; and 
to the Hebrews, ^I am Jehovah thy God, who brought 
thee out of the house of bondage ; thou shalt have no other 
gods beside (or before) me.'' What is true of the legends 
of Moses is equally true of those of his successor. In the 
24th chapter, Joshua is made to urge lipon the people 
fidelity to Jehovah, not at all on the ground of an ex- 
alted Monotheism, but because it would be the blackest 
ingratitude in them not to prefer the God who had heaped 
such favours upon them to all other deities. The sub- 
sequent records of the nation, as far as they can be con- 
sidered historical, become a monstrous paradox in psycho- 
logical research if we suppose that there existed at that 
time in the Hebrew mind any idea of one true God such as 
we possess. 

In fine, these records are full of charges against them of 
infidelity to Jehovah but do not contain one single charge 



X.] EELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 285 

against tliem of Atheism on that account. No wonder ! 
Do these records ever describe Jeliovali in language sucli 
as a modern civilized tiiinker would dare to use ? On the 
contrary, they tell us that Jehovah said to Moses : Let 
them make me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them 
(Exod. XXV. 8, 21, 22). Put the cover on the ark, and 
there will I talk to thee. And Jehovah spake with 
Moses face to face as a man with his friend (Exod. xxxiii. 
9, 11). And Jehovah said, I will put thee in a cleft of 
the rock, and will cover thee with my hand, while I pass 
by, and thou shalt see my back parts (Exod. xxxiii. 21 — 
24). Moses is described as piquing the amour propre of 
the Hebrews, by telling them how it was reported among 
the surrounding nations that Jehovah was their God and 
was seen by them face to face (Numb. xiv. 14). He is de- 
scribed as pleading with Jehovah when very angry, and 
nobly offering himself as a victim to his wrath, and thus 
gaining a respite and commutation of their punishment ; 
which, however, involved an entire change of the whole 
programme of the Exodus, a change of base for their 
military operations, and the postponement of their invasion 
of Palestine for the mystic number of 40 years. 

Surely all this is merely a slight modification of those far 
more ancient and semi- savage ideas of deity which ap- 
pear in the legends of the creation and of the flood, where 
Jehovah is said to make woman out of a rib of man; 
to take Noah and ' shut him into the ark ; ' ' to smell a 
sweet savour ' when Noah liberated made his first sacrifice; 
to invent the rainbow ; and to promise no more ' to curse 
the ground for man^s sake.^ 

But time went on. The wars of settlement, the civil 
feuds of rival judges, came to an end. The poet warrior 
and the regal philosopher sat in turn upon the throne of 
Zion. Peace bore its proper fruit; commerce enlarged the 
native genius of the Jew. Priesthoods devised grand 
ceremonials. The discussion of false mysteries sharpened 
the souPs perception of the true, as alchemy in our day 
led on to chemistry. Luxury bred vice, and the miseries 
of despotism generated a reactionary patriotism. The 
school of the sacrificers found itself confronted by the 
school of the sacrificed. Prophets arose to denounce 
the priest, and die for it. But as they died, the heavens 



286 THE FOUR TYPES OP [lECT. 

opened, and they caught those visions of the one true 
God which were to become the living realities of after 
ages. Calamities crushed in upon the little remnant of 
that kingdom which David founded, and Solomon illumin- 
ated with his taste and wisdom, idolater and sensualist as 
he was. The poor ' favoured people •' were meal between 
the millstones of Egypt and Babylon ground to the finest 
flour. Their anthropomorphic deity vanished like a power- 
less, mocking spectre before the irresistible wind raised 
by migrating nations. But in its place arose the sun in a 
sky which if not clear was hot and bright. The abstract 
idea of God as a unit, an Infinite one, on whose strong 
arm Nature the mother and Man her baby child could 
always lean with confidence and ever- springing hope — of 
God the sole creator, sole sustainer, sole judge and exe- 
cutioner of justice — penetrated that broken mass of 
Hebrew people as the alkaline waters of the drainage of 
the rain penetrate disturbed and fractured regions of the 
earth^s crust, permeating the entire substance, metamor- 
phosing, crystallizing and charging it with veins of the 
precious metals. 

It is impossible not to see that the God of the priests 
and the God of the prophets of Israel — and the same is 
true in our day — were two very difierent deities ; the 
embodiment of two very difierent classes of ideas. ' Let 
any one, (says Greg) ' compare the partial, unstable, re- 
vengeful, and deceitful God of Exodus and Numbers with 
the sublime and unique Deity of Job and the nobler 
Psalms ; or even the God of Ezekiel and Daniel with the 
God of Isaiah ; and he can scarcely fail to admit that the 
conception of the one living and true God was a plant of 
slow and gradual growth in the Hebrew mind, and was 
due — not to Moses, the patriarchs, or the priests, but to 
the superiority of individual minds at various periods of 
their history.^ This plant of Aryan growth was first 
planted in the mountains of Judea when Solomon, estab- 
lishing his kingdom ' from the great River Euphrates 
to the Western Sea,^ brought his people into contact wifch 
the pure Zoroastrian monotheism of the Persian plateau ; 
and it came to flower when several centuries afterwards 
, the chosen people ' were banished from their native hills 
to hang their harps upon the willows of Babylon; or 



I.] RELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 287 

rather, we may say, were sent to school, tribe after tribe, 
back to the lands where their original ancestors first drew 
the breath of life. 

It was Solomon who first learned how to say 'Behold, the 
heaven of heavens cannot contain thee, how much less this 
house which I have built ? ^ * ' The eyes of Jehovah are 
everywhere, beholding the evil and the good/ f 

It was no priest or Levite of the temple service, but 
David the young shepherd poet, or more likely yet, some 
later prophet whose verses equally dear to the hearts of 
all humanity came to be sung under that all overshadow- 
ing nam.e, who chanted — '^ Whither shall I go from thy 
spirit, or whither shall I flee from thy presence ? ' ' Thou 
coverest thyself with light as with a garment; thou art 
clothed with honour and majesty/ 'Jehovah ! who shall 
abide in thy tent ? who shall dwell on thy sacred tumulus ? 
He that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness, 
and speaketh the truth heartily. For the word of Je- 
hovah is right, and all his works are done in truth/ 
' He loveth righteousness and judgment. Lying lips are 
his abomination. But true dealers are his delight.'' ' The 
counsel of Jehovah standeth for ever.' ' Thou desirest 
not sacrifice, else would I give it. Thou delightest not in 
burnt- offering.' ' The world is mine and the fulness 
thereof. Will I eat the flesh of bulls, and drink the blood 
of goats ? If I were hungry would I tell thee ? Ofier unto 
Ood thanksgiving.' :|: 

It was no Hebrew priest or Levite, but some Idumean 
sheikh of the eastern desert, who lived it would seem from 
the best philological criticism long after the days of Solo- 
mon, who said all those fine things in the Book of Job, 
like 'Lo, he goeth by me, but I perceive him not.' ' How 
should a man be just with God ? he cannot answer him for 
one of a thousand. For he is not man, as I am, that we should 
come together in judgment. Shall a man be more pure 
than his Maker ? ' 1| 

The fine words which are put into the mouth of the first 

* 1 Kings viu. Cf. Svvaaai St aii Tcdvro<j aKovtiv 'Avspi Kj]Sofji'sv<{i. Uisd, 

16. 614. 

t Prov. XV. Cf. Otoi TO. irdvTa laaatv. Odys. 4. 379. 

J Psalms xxxiii., 1., li., civ., cxxxix. ; Prov. xv, 

II Job ix., xi. 



288 THE FOUR TYPES OP [LECT. 

of the prophets, the reputed teacher of David ' The 
strength of Israel will not lie, nor repent, for he is not a 
man to repent,^ * give us still the narrow idea of a national 
god, and not of the universal and only God of the later 
prophets, such as was known to the author of the Book 
of Bcclesiastes, who threw the same idea into a much 
larger mould : ' I know that whatsoever God doeth shall 
be for ever; nothing can be put to it nor nothing taken 
from it/ t 

It was in the midst of the desolations of Israel by the 
hordes of Mesopotamia that the greatest of the prophets 
expressed the Zoroastrian faith in those sublime words, 
* To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto 
me ? saith Jehovah/ J 

And it was in the last convulsions of national extinction 
that the Prophet Micah proposed and answered the 
same awful question in the still sublimer words : 
' Wherewith shall I come before Jehovah, and bow myself 
before the Highest God ? With burnt- offerings, calves of 
a year old ? Will he be pleased with thousands of rams, 
or ten thousands of rivers of oil ? Shall I give my fi.rstbom 
for my transgression ; the fruit of my body for the sin of 
my soul ? He hath showed thee, man, what is good. 
And what doth Jehovah require of thee, but to do justly, 
to love mercy, and to walk humbly before thy God ! ' \\ 

Thy God ! The cycle is complete. The God of Abraham 
had become the God of the ten tribes ; the God of Israel had 
grown to be the God of all ; and now this God of mankind 
is about to come incarnate to the individual soul to claim 
his last and highest throne of all. 

It was the propagation of these splendid conceptions of 
deity subsequent to the Babylonian captivity, and after 
they had come under the Zoroastrian influence of Persia, 
which cured the J ews of infidelity to Jehovah, made them 
self-sacrifioing Unitarians to the end of time, and pre- 
pared the way for the founding of the Christian Church. 
And we are probably to explain the rapid spread of Chris- 
tianity at the outset by the wide diffusion of Jewish ideas 
previous to the birth of Christ among the sober-minded 
Gentiles of Western Asia and the Roman empire. But 

* 1 Sam. XV, f Eccl. iii. % Isaiah i. || Micah vi. 



X.] BELIGIOUS WOESHIP. 289 

there resulted thence a strange mixture of monotheism 
with polytheism before the Christian Era^ corresponding 
to the mixture of Christianity with every form of local 
heathenism which happened afterwards. 

Professor Sophocles has lately published an ancient 
epitaph, dug up recently by a seeker for treasures of another 
sort, near the little town of Zei-bhokhia in Magnesia. I 
will give you his translation of it.* 

' No other corpse, whether of a man or of a woman, is 
permitted to be deposited in this vault. And if any one 
shall recklessly dare to open it, he will anger the most 
great, the King, the Almighty Maker of all things ; and 
all the gods, and goddesses, and demigods, and the lady 
queen herself. For the depositing of any other corpse with 
these is forbidden once for all.-' 

We could not have a better description than this 
epitaph aifords us of that mixed or primitive theism which 
pervades the older Hebrew or Mosaic Scriptures, and 
which gave place to a grander and purer monotheism 
among the prophets of a later age. 

The date of the beginning of this change then would be 
about 1000 years before Christ. We find in the Hindu 
Scriptures of that date evidences of a similar growth of 
the religious mind. ' In the oldest portions of the hymns 
[of the Rig Veda, the most ancient of the Sanscrit books] 
we discover,' says Mr Muir, the latest and best English 
writer on this subject, ''few traces of any such abstract 
conceptions of the Deity. They disclose a much more 
primitive stage of religious belief. They are the produc- 
tions of simple men, who, under the influence of the most 
impressive phenomena of nature, saw everywhere the 
presence and agency of divine powers, who imagined that 
each of the great provinces of the universe was directed 
and animated by its own separate deity, and who had not 
yet risen to a clear idea of one Supreme Creator and 
governor of all things.' f 

The hymns of the Rig Veda are hymns to Agni the god 
of Fire, Surya the god of the Sun, Indra the god of Storms, 
addressed each under a variety of names, and strangely 
mixed up together, and sometimes actually identified with 

♦ Journ. E.. Asiat. Soc, New Series, i. 2, p. 339. 

t Proc. Amer. Acad. p. 11, 1864. 

19 



290 THE FOUR TYPES OF [lECT. 

one another. But, as Muir and others have shown, there 
are strains in these ancient hymns which seem to come from 
some inner sanctuary, revealing a conception of divinity 
more spiritual and universal than the general tenour of the 
hymns. The grades of this spiritualism involved in the 
general materialism of the Vedic hymns are various. The 
reader can, as it were, watch the expansion of the poetic 
idea. Varuna is described as dwelling in a palace of a 
thousand columns, and a thousand doors,* before he is 
described as dwelling in all worlds, as sovereign ruler, 
possessed of illimitable resources, meting out, creating, 
and upholding the heavens and the earth. t The different 
earliest deities had their different admirers and special 
devotees. Each deity was praised in strains as exalted as 
the capacity of the worshipper, and as the growth of the 
religious ideas of his age. Hence, as the notions of space 
and time became enlarged, and the powers of abstract 
thought were cultivated, the pantheon swelled to colossal 
proportions ; and each separate deity belonging to it be- 
came to his own worshippers the infinite and eternal God 
of gods ; while yet retaining his own distinctive name and 
some relics of his original, local, and specific character. 

The resemblance between the poetic imagery of the 
Hebrew and Hindu Scriptures of that ancient date is 
strikingly in harmony with the ethnological derivation of 
the Abrahamidge from the land of Brahma. The Hebrew 
poet sings : ' The eyes of Jehovah are in every place be- 
holding the evil and the good.' The Yedic poet sings : 
' Varuna, the mighty ruler of the worlds, sees as if close at 
hand.'' The Hebrew : ' Whither can I flee from thy pre- 
sance ? If I ascend into heaven, thou art there ! If I 
make my bed in the grave, thou art there ! If I take the 
wings of the morning, and fly into the uttermost parts of 
the sea, even there will thy right hand uphold me/ — is 
echoed by the Sanscrit : ' The earth belongs to Varuna 
the King, and the mighty sky whose ends are far away; 
the seas are his loins, though he lives in the smallest pool ; 
let one flee beyond the furthest skies, he should not escape 
Varuna the King, whose messengers descend from heaven 

* Rig Veda, ii. 41. 5 ; v. 62. 6; vii. 88. 5. 

t Ibid. iv. 42. 3, 4 ; vi. 70. 1 ; vii. 86. 1 ; 87. 5, 6 ; viii. 41. *, 6. 10; 
43. 1. 



X.] BELiaiOUS WORSHIP. 291 

and thousand-eyed traverse the earth/ There is in the 
Hebrew poems a sad^ sweety noble simplicity and intense 
spiritual personality, which is not so perceptible in their 
Indian contemporaries. There is also in them an absence 
of gross mistakes and exaggerations which place them 
on an eminence unapproachable by the admirers of their 
Sanscrit rivals ; yet the common propriety which both 
these holy literatures have in all the essential elements of 
the divine idea is unmistakable. 

This is especially true of the later hymns of the Eig 
Veda, and of the hymns of the Atharva Veda, supposed to 
have been not much, if any, less ancient. It is in these 
that we begin to find those grand titles : Visva Karnian 
'the universal architect,* and Prajapati 'lord of crea- 
tures;* but we notice that they are applied still to special 
deities : Indra, Savitr, Eudra, Soma, Vishnu, or Varuna. 
In the 121st hymn of the Eig Veda, for example, the deity 
is celebrated (under the name Hiranyagarbha) as '^ai'isen 
in the beginning ; only lord of all ; upholder of heavens 
and earth ; giver of life and breath ; god of all gods, and 
the animating principle of their existence.* 

I need not follow this subject further. I confess I do 
not at all agree with the common explanations of the Hindu 
mythology, as published by Muir, Max Miiller, and other 
Sanscrit scholars. Their theories seem to me to have no 
system. I think it is because they have no basis. They 
have not yet struck the key-note. In this course of lectures 
I have been gradually preparing your minds for a view of 
the subject, which I think may explain most of the diflS- 
culties which Sanscrit mythologists confess that they en- 
counter. This is my tenth lecture. I have still one more 
to deliver. I have reserved the theme to which I have 
given most attention to the last.f I do not wish to scare you 
with a deluge of unintelligible words. I think I can repay 
your patience with a solid addition to your knowledge. I 
think I can show you an order reigning over the apparent 
chaos of ideas respecting the gods in olden times. I think 
I can put into your hands the right key to the door — the 
safe clue for the labjmnth. The ancient poets were not 
mad-men ; the old philosophers were not all fools. They • 

• Sanscrit Texts, iv. 13 H. Muir, p. 344. 

t The lecture on Arkism has been omitted in this edition. 



292 THE FOUR TYPES OF [LECT. 

could distinguish sense from nonsense as well as we — ■ 
tliough. not as well as we. Classical scholars have been 
tormented by the inconsistent and contradictory family- 
relations of the Greek and Roman gods, father, brother 
and son being mixed up together. Sanscrit scholars are 
equally at a loss to comprehend why Bramanas-pati should 
be called in one hymn of the Rig Veda ' the father of the 
gods/ * and in another ' the son of Tvashtr, lord of all.'' f 
Now I think that it is only in the theory of the develop- 
ment of the later monotheisms and polytheisms out of the 
older ancestral worships and fetich-worship of primeval 
times that we can find our explanation of these and similar 
mythological absurdities. To the ancient bard initiated in 
the Arkite mysteries they were no absurdities. What was 
fetich to the vulgar crowd outside was history and poetry to 
the priest within. And so it may become to us. But we must 
comprehend the symbols. Of these I will speak at large 
when next we meet, and you will permit me to devote an 
entire evening to them ; for they cover the whole ground 
of human life and interpenetrate every department of na- 
tural history. 

For this evening I have but one more word to add. I 
have spoken of three types of religious ideas : 1. Ancestral 
worship; 2. Fetich worship; 3. Polytheism and Mono- 
theism. 

lY. The highest type of the religious idea is Pantheism. 
It is the philosophic idea of God. It is the idea which 
science takes of the divine. Science, you know, is the know- 
ledge of the logical understanding ; not the instinctive 
sight of the pure reason — not the deep faith of the loving 
imagination. Science is essentially irreligious^ that is, 
unworshipping. Science looks down upon things — not up 
to them. Science analyzes, dissects, discusses all things; 
God among the rest : or tries to do so ; it is its vocation, 
its nature, its duty. Do not blame it. Do not feel a 
horror at it, as the Italians shuddered at good old Vasari, 
with his medical fez, loose gown, and scalpel. Vasari 
with his scalpel looked like a vampire hanging over that 
dead body. But there was no demoniac fury in the old 
man-'s eyes ; no — there was a holy zeal burning in them to 

* Muir, p. 344. H. V. ii, 26. 3. t R- V. ii. 23. 17. 



X.] KELIGIOUS WOESHIP. 293 

discover tlie laws of the anatomy of the dead for the good 
of the hving. Science is no vampire of the night, flap- 
ping its wings over our sleeping religion, soothing its 
slumbers, and sucking its blood. God forbid the thought. 
Every part of man must do its duty; and science is the 
work of man^s logical understanding. Now, the investiga- 
tion of God by man^s understanding has always resulted in 
some theory of Pantheism. 

Whether philosophers took Fetichism as their stand- 
point, or whether they took Ancestor-worship as their 
starting-point, they arrived at Pantheism. The worship 
of the father on earth developes itself into the worship of 
the father in heaven. Then the attributes of the personal 
god become generalized, refined, distributed, dissipated, 
and identified with the universe. When ancient sages 
came to believe in the absolute goodness, justice, love, and 
wisdom of deity, or providence, they fell into that peace 
which needed nothing, feared nothing, and therefore wor- 
shipped nothing. Nothing to blame, nothing to praise, 
the perfect whole became one great divinity. It was so in 
Magadha and Benares ; it is so in Concord and Boston. 

On the other hand, the worship of the fetich developed 
itself into the elemental worship of the ancients, and into 
the thunder- and war-providence worship of orthodox 
Christianity. If the progress of science has explained 
away the miracles, where is the miracle-maker? Dis- 
tributed throughout his universe. All nature becomes a 
miracle. ' In him we live and move and have our being.'' 

But universal Pantheism is impossible. All the common 
instincts of man oppose his pi-ogress in that direction. 
Man also is a trinity : he is heart, imagination, under- 
standing, in one. His God must therefore always be per- 
sonal and anthropomorphic as well as infinite : personal — 
to be beloved; anthropomorphic — to be imagined; and 
infinite — to be confided in. The Incarnation of Jesus was 
a reaction of the human heart against the cold spaciousness 
of Pantheism. The Assumption of Jesus was a reaction of 
the imagination against the dark vagueness of Pantheism. 
So long as man feels himself a child he will climb up upon 
the knees of the Father who is in heaven ; or nestle to the 
bosom of Abraham. So long as woman feels herself op- 
pressed and afflicted she wiU idolize a well-defined divinity. 



294 THE FOUR TYPES OP EELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 

Joy and sorrow make common cause against tlie approach 
of Pantheism. Touth and women — three quarters of the 
human race — are idolaters by natural necessity. Let then 
the progress of science — the deductions of the logical un- 
derstanding — clear away from men's eyes the errors of the 
past, and lead them into that liberty of spirit which is due 
to Christianity, ' the liberty wherewith Christ made his 
people free/ — ^it will be none the less a fact that ^the things 
of the Spirit are spiritually discerned.^ There are things 
that science cannot grasp, some things that lie beyond the 
scope of logic ; and it will be as true in every age as it 
was when the blessed Master took a Httle child and set him 
in the midst of them, that — ' many things are hidden from 
the wise and prudent which are revealed unto babes. 



LECTURE XL 

THE POSSIBLE IN DESTINY. 

Thbke are but two great schools of philosopliy, the 
Optimist and the Pessimist. 

The one teaches that the world was made to be a 
success — a distinguished success. 

The other teaches that the world made itself, and is 
bound to be a failure — a flagrant and miserable failure. 

Can these schools claim co-ordinate authority ? Can 
such opposite philosophies be avouched of equal value ? 
Impossible. The senate-chamber and the mad-house, 
a ball-room and a hospital-ward, could not inspire spec- 
tators with more contrary sentiments. 

Who are they who compose these schools ? 

Pessimists are made of thinkers who are sick at 
heart — the discontented, the discouraged, and the dis- 
consolate ; hopers who have lost hope in losing youth, 
fortune, ambition, affection, zest in work ; dreamers of 
the absolute, who are tired of wandering blindly among 
truths undemonstrable, and vices irremediable ; men 
who have lost themselves in scenes of misery not to be 
relieved by charity ; men shipwrecked on a monotonous 
continent of ignorance, gloomy with fogs impenetrable 
to the rays of science ; men of exceptional sensibilities ; 
men of diseased, abnormal tenderness of spirit; men 
whose eyeballs are avenues for the approach of pain, 
whose hearts are overswoUen with excessive sympa- 
thies ; men crushed by the load of the sins of an unre- 
deemed world. 

Can such as these be philosophers, teachers, proph- 
ets ? These be no prophets. These have never heard 
the voice of one crying in the wilderness, " Make His 
paths straight before Him ! " 



296 THE POSSIBLE IN DESTINY. [LECT. 

Pessimism is the doctrine of the school of the lost 
prophets. 

Its image and symbol is that gaunt figure perambu- 
lating the battlements of the doomed city, crying by 
day and by night : " Woe ! Woe to Jerusalem ! " and 
struck dead by the flying stone from the Roman 
engines, with the cry in his mouth: "Woe! Woe to 
myself ! " 

• But the school of the Optimists is in the grove of 
beauty and in the portico of health; where the sun 
shines and the birds carol ; whither the sounds of the 
anvil and the loom penetrate from the city, and the 
lowing of kiue and bleat of flocks from the pasture and 
ploughed field. 

Optimism weighs the sum of good against the sum of 
evil and believes in eternal providence ; measures the 
misery of life and finds it ia the proportion of the lees 
to the wine ; estimates knowledge by its commonplace 
usefulness, and counts the virtues by the number of 
honest faces in a crowd. 

Optimism is the practical prose side of philosophy, 
on which is written the legend of patience, contentment, 
hard work, and holy love for man and beast ; life with 
many a merry passage for the most unfortunate, and 
death, the angel, the Christ, releaser of the spirits for 
a season in prison. 

To both these opposing schools " The World " means 
man — ^mankind. The rest of the world is merely the 
addenda. Respecting man only are they opposed. 
They agree that the animal, vegetable, mineral, and 
physical phenomena of the universe are all right. Only 
man is badly treated, thinks the Pessimist. Man also 
is well arranged, thinks the Optimist. The Pessimist 
is inconsequent, the Optimist is logical. In the school 
of Pessimism one virtually sits in the seat of the 
scorner. 

The destiny of all things is to attain the possible : for 
the world at large, the possible for it ; for mankind, 
the possible for it ; for man in particular, the possible 
for him. 

How do we know this ? We do not know it. We 



XI.] THE POSSIBLE IN DESTINY. " 297 

only believe it, are sure of it, rely upon it. It is a 
reasonable conclusion from all we know, and from all 
we see going on around us. 

Science is the definition of the possible. Science is 
knowledge of relationships determined by surrounding 
circumstances ; of the knowledge of exhibitions of 
forces counteracting and directing each other within a 
bounded arena overlooked by spectators. Each force 
has its possibilities of scope, direction and intensity, 
resulting in established possibilities of form, color, size, 
quantities and qualities, all and singly predetermined 
and postdetermined by a common law. 

Life is the struggle from within outward to accom- 
plish all that is possible by and for the living thing. 
Destiny is its success. 

Is there a destiny of failure ? Certainly not. Fail- 
ure is merely failure ; a check from the surrounding 
success. What one gains another loses ; what one loses 
another gains. Each attains its own possible, though 
not another's. There are eddies in all rivers. While 
the whole succeeds perfectly, parts succeed only par- 
tially. The current shoots ahead, the eddies lag; but 
the whole river reaches the sea, except what rises into 
the sky. 

What is possible? Theologians say that all things 
are possible with God ; but it is precisely with God 
that all is not possible ; for God is the embodiment, the 
embodier of law; and law is another word for cor- 
relation and interlimitation. Law is both the assertion 
and denial of possibilities. 

Two and two cannot make five ; a body cannot be 
hard and soft, hot and cold, active and passive, acid 
and alkali at the same moment to its vis-d-vis. One 
cannot be before another, and yet behind it ; which is 
only saying over again that order must reign, and 
eddies be in all rivers bounded by irregular shores. 
All creatures resemble rivers bounded by irregular 
shores ; and the possible for them — and theii destiny 
to accomplish the possible — is made up of the current 
and the eddies. 

Some of the relationships which limit the possible 



298 THE POSSIBLE IN DESTINY. [LECT. 

and predict destiny seem to be fixed and nniversal ; 
while others are evidently slight, fleeting, and momen- 
tarily influential, or, as we call them, accidental. But 
it cannot be that even the vastest relationships of the 
universe are really fixed and universal. They only 
seem so to us babes of time and place. Therefore, 
while the destiny of man seems unchangeably good to 
the Optimist, and fixedly bad to the Pessimist, it is 
running a course, describing an orbit, unrolling a life 
of its own too large and long and too distant (in past 
and future) from our momentary stand-point of obser- 
vation to be studied by us according to the ordinary 
canons of human investigation. 

The destiny of every created thing is necessarily 
determined for it by the relations which exist between 
the qualities of its own constitution and the qualities 
which characterize created things around it. To know 
its destiny, we must know first what it is, and secondly 
what they are. 

Take this crystal and drop it into the sea. What 
becomes of it ? That will depend : 1, upon whether it 
be a crystal of quartz, or of feldspar, or of calcite, or 
of common salt ; 2, upon where in the sea you drop it ; 
on what shore ; swept by what current ; in the tropics 
or near the pole. In one case, it will resist solution and 
be covered up where you drop it, or be swept away to 
be deposited in the distance ; in another case, it will be 
dissolved and mixed with the tides and circumnavigate 
the globe ; enter into the tissues of sciweeds and corals, 
or become part of the tests of moUusks or bony fibre of 
fish. 

A babe is born into the constituent mass of human 
society. What is to be its destiny? Say, first, what 
are its inherited qualities of soul and body ; secondly, 
into what specially constituted zone of social life it is 
dropped, in what age of peace or war, in what class of 
luxury or sordid penury, in the city or in the fields, in 
the forest or in the desert, among the mountains or 
upon the plain, amid the snows and scanty daylight of 
the North which imprison men beneath their house- 
roofs, or where perpetual warmth and abundant fruit 
make life in the open air a free festival. 



XI.] THE POSSIBLE IN DESTINY. 299 

The key-note of modern science is given by this A- 
string of the violin, this dominant of existence : that 
every created thing, whether belonging to the spiritual 
or material worlds, is acted upon by and reacts upon its 
surroundings by virtue of its own nature and theirs. 
The result is its destiny. There is no escape. There 
is no intervention. Given the first two terms of the 
equation, the third follows. 

But the terms are complicated, and the formulae of 
resolution numerous. Substitution after substitution 
must be made by the calculator before the value of x 
appears. He is dealing with such a multitude of fac- 
tors that his calculus must be both integral and differ- 
ential. Long//'s multiply on the page. Perhaps the 
value of X never appears. That is not the fault of 
nature nor of science, but of the mathematician. A slip 
spoils his demonstration but has no effect upon the 
nature of things. Some unrecognized element in the 
problem must be sought for. The reagents react always 
in the same style, whether in the beaker-glass of Ber- 
zelius, or in the alembic of Paracelsus, or in the crucible 
of the old mountebank of Somerset County. Nature is 
no observer of persons. She cares not who is looking 
on and does her duty. This is the astonishing specta- 
cle of destiny. Nature confers no D.D.'s, calls no man 
sage or saint, is blind to the existence of prophets, deaf 
to the groans of nations, smiles at the suggestions of 
her pupils, and frowns at the absolution of priests. 
There is no absolution. The universe is all solution and 
precipitation — re-solution and re-precipitation — with- 
out haste, without indecision, unerring, absolute, inevi- 
table, normal, beautiful and divine. 

In this despotism which the nature of things habit- 
ually, unceasingly, inexorably, both benignantly and^ 
pitilessly exercises over all created things the Pagan 
and the Pessimist see fate and the devil ; the Christian 
and the Optimist see God's powerful mind and benev- 
olent heart. 

That is the essential difference between the two 
schools. 

But there are Pessimists concealed in the school of 



300 THE POSSIBLE IN DESTINY. 

Optimism, pretenders, eclectics, who borrow from the 
text-books of its adversary to warp and debase their 
own profession. When the sons of God assemble to 
worship, Satans appear among them, point to the case of 
Job, and say : All then is not good, and all is not inevi- 
table. Destiny may be thwarted by its own inventor; 
natural consequences may be averted by prayer, fasting, 
and alms; miracles may be wrought on special occa- 
sions; demons maybe unchained from the Euphrates, 
and science may be rendered uncertain by divine or 
diabolic interposition. 

No Christian can be a true Optimist who subscribes 
to the popular belief in hell. No Optimist can be a 
true philosopher who subscribes to the popular belief in 
miracles and prayer. 

Yet hell is a part of the universe, miracles a part of 
its phenomena, and prayer the privilege of life. 

These mysteries we must examine. They involve 
their own explanation in that of the ^destiny of mankind. 
But there is a natural order to every investigation ; and 
to discover the destiny of man we must begin by distin- 
guishing the whole from the parts, the individual from 
the race. We must also distinguish destiny from des- 
tination. We must learn the future from the past, and 
the past from the present. And we must bring to bear 
upon the subject of our research the light of every 
department of physical and mental science. 

This is our task. It is a hard one. It has strained 
the intellectual sinews of the greatest thinkers. It has 
filled the libraries of the world with treatises. How 
can it be accomplished in a chapter or two ? 



LECTURE XII. 

THE DESTIKY OF MAN. 

When a great subject presents itself to the mind, it 
is as when the countless clove-clouds of Egypt take 
wing above the gunner's head. He knows not how to 
shoot. 

A traveller's destination is his journey's end. The 
traveller's destiny comprises all his adventures by the 
way, and the success or failure of his hopes and wishes 
for that and every other journey he may ever make. 
The traveller's destiny rides on horseback outside his 
carriage door, like a lady's lover or a convict's guard 
or a general's aide-de-camp. 

The Moirai sit by the ^lousewife's hearth, and rock 
the baby's cradle. The three weird sisters, Clotho, 
Lachesis, and Atropos, spin, measure out, and clip at 
the appointed length the thread of its destined life. 
Born of the night, they explain not their work ; ser- 
vants of deity, they listen to no complaints; joint 
regents of land and sea, there is no escape from their 
dominion ; the common wives of one husband, Neces- 
sity, their lips and the baby's lips are alike sealed. 

And thus they sat at the cradle of the world. 

Fate: fatum est, sat sapientihus verhum, — "the word 
has gone out, and shall not return. ... So shall my word, 
going forth from my mouth, return not unto me void, 
but accomplish what I please, and prosper where I send 
it." It is decreed. 

From this fviJ-', I say, Greeks made their ^vm, a voice 
from heaven, a prophecy, an oracle; and Latins their 
fama (fame), and their fatum (fate). For whatever 



302 THE DESTIJSTY OF MAN. [LECT. 

happens is first ordered, and then reported. History- 
is but the echo of predestination. And the joys and 
sorrows of every man are but a drama played between 
the author behind the scenes and the audience before 
the footlights, — an anonymous author, and an audience 
indistinguishable for its multitudinous variety. 

What then is fame, unless it be referred back to its 
author ? And what worth hath human history except 
when recited by a soul inspired with a knowledge of 
the mind of God? To comprehend the destiny of a 
man requires a comprehension of his birth and educa- 
tion, — those hereditary traits which characterized the 
stock on which he budded, and the divine appointments 
of soil and climate in which he grew ; the race to which 
he belonged ; the century in which he lived ; the wealth 
or poverty which lapped him ; the winds which blew 
about him ; the food he ate, the games he played, the 
books he read, the women he loved, the battles, great or 
small, with himself and with the world outside, which 
he fought, and how in each and all of them the victory 
perched. For out of all these destinies his destiny is 
compounded. 

It is a mere trick of the irrational fancy to argue that 
a man's death is his destiny because when he dies he 
vanishes suddenly from view. Yes : from our view. 
But how is that event more significant of destiny than 
was his sudden appearance on the scene to our view? 
The sentiment which palpitates through society at the 
death of a man has as little share in the " Word of the 
Lord" as the applause or the hisses under cover of 
which an actor quits the stage. It is but one of his 
many adventures, — a part of his continuous destiny; 
and commonly as slight an index of his native charac- 
ter as it is an unimportant episode of his biography. 
The majority of human beings, like guests from a 
crowded ball-room, slip away unperceived. 

Destiny for the individual is made up of unnoticed 
and unnoticeable articles. It streams through one's 
days and nights as diseased or healthy blood-globules 
succeed each other through one's veins. It tempers a 
man's palate, and nerves his arms. It looks out at him 



Xn.] THE DESTINY OF MAN. 303 

from the eyes of his wife, and is reflected upon him in 
the behavior of his children. It furnishes or unfur- 
nishes his homestead. It sows and reaps his fields. It 
sharpens or blunts the tools of his handicraft. It per- 
vades his heart with passions, and his brain with ideas. 
It is the orbit in which he moves toward or from the 
central sun of his existence, drawing him inward to the 
warmer and more brilliant regions of the universe, or 
driving him forth into the outer darkness and cold of 
solitary" spaces. 

But the main point is, How does the man himself 
regard his own fate ? 

This also is part of his fate, and may be almost called 
the self-determining will of his fate. For, if he make 
himself his fate's friend, all will go well with it and him. 
But, if he conceives an aversion for it, if it disgusts 
him, enrages him, torments him ; if he be afraid of it, as 
a burglar breaking into his chamber, or &S a jailer feed- 
ing him on bread and water who may forget or with- 
hold and leave him to starve, or as a tyrant whose nod 
can at any moment order him to execution, or as a 
treacherous guide who will probably lead him to self- 
destruction, or as a master who only wants him for a 
tool or a plaything or raw stuff to make something else 
out of — then he and it are lost together. 

Men lump all fatalists and condemn them in a mass. 
But no difference can be more fundamental, more egre- 
gious, more operative, than the difference between fatal- 
isms and — fatalisms. Buddhistic fatalism is grandiose, 
if absurd. Mohammedan fatalism is as commonplace 
as it is enervating. Christian fatalism is inspiring, 
stimulating, strengthening, and affectionate. Scientific 
fatalism is the soul of curiosity, the basis of reason, a 
whip to investigation, a sword to superstition ; robs 
religion of its terrors, and prepares the whole apparatus 
of the future for man's salvation. 

Kismet, murmurs the Turk, on the approach of the 
cholera or plague, and sits down to smoke his pipe. 
Deo volente, whispers the Christian, as he hurries to the 
hospital to save whom he can. And there he finds 
already in advance of him the man of science calmly 



304 THE DESTINY OF MAN. [LECT. 

studying the unalterable laiv of disease, and the trained 
nurse instructed in a routine as intelligent and regular 
as that of the solar system, representing in her sacred 
person the mind, the heart, and the hand of God — 
all three in one — and she also a fatalist, knowing how 
to say of any patient : saved ! or, doomed '! but never 
damned I 

The future destiny of mankind is for all to become 
fatalists in the Christian sense ; to say, " If thou wilt 
not what I will, then, O Lord, I will what thou willst; 
and so we shall still be agreed." As the order of the 
world becomes universally known it will become uni- 
versally both acquiesced in and enjoyed, both obeyed 
and commanded. Learn to obey and thou shalt 
become ruler, says the Fate in Nature to the Fate in 
Man. Love me and I will serve thee, says this queen- 
lover to her .lackey. Lift my veil reverently and take 
a thousand kisseS, says this Isis to the priest. Fear 
the Lord and depart from evil, so shall thy days be 
long and prosperous on earth, rings through the air of 
all lands, and will so ring for a thousand years, until all 
shall know the Lord from the greatest even unto the 
least of the sons and daughters of Adam. 

Nature then is fate, and natural religion is the des- 
tined religion of the future. Man's salvation is the 
product of obedience to the Col-Jehovah ; this " voice 
which maketh the hinds to calve, and breaketh the 
cedars of Lebanon" ; and the salvation of the race is to 
be an outcome of universal education in true science, 
where all shall know the Lord, and hearken diligently 
to his voice, — of a universal training of the brain, the 
affections, and the will of men of all races in all lands. 

How is this to come about ? Education, by the mul- 
tiplication of teachers; sanctification, by the multipli- 
cation of saints; activity, by the multiplication of 
heroes. But teachers, saints, and heroes are them- 
selves men and women. 

Therefore, the prime and central fate of mankind is 
man himself. This is that God manifest in flesh. This 
is that Holy Ghost. This is the Jesus who is to be 
with people — his people, and all mankind are his 



XII.] THE DESTINY OF MAN. 305 

people — to the end of time ; and, as he walks, his 
special followers walk behind him as students follow a 
demonstrator through the clinic ; and the following 
grows as the ages elapse ; and finally the whole mixed 
multitudes of the earth will be but one vast flock, led 
by the great, good Shepherd. 

Meanwhile, every good soul is a Jesus redivivus, and 
has his or her own desert and Galilee, Tabor and Geth- 
semane. As he was a fate to millions, each of them 
becomes a fate to many. Science blunders if she limits 
her definition of fate as habitat by excluding man. The 
prime factor in the habitat of the bird is the abundance 
or scarcity of seed ; of the fish, the temperature of the 
sea ; of the buffalo and the horse, the luxuriance or 
drought of the prairie grass; but of man, the virtue or 
vice of surrounding people. 

Every human being is therefore a main part of the 
fate of his or her fellow-creatures; and the destiny of a 
generation or of a race is determined by a plebiscite 
vote, just as is the result of an election held on demo- 
cratic principles. The majority carries the day and 
holds the reins of government. But an aristocratic 
minority also exercises power, and more power in pro- 
portion to its size than the democratic majority. The 
proof of resident deity is, that, in the long run, the 
minority of goodness outweighs the majority of bad- 
ness, so that the whole tendency of history is toward 
goodness. For, one man or woman, if wise and good, 
can affect the fate of society more than a score of men 
and women who are foolish and ill-behaved. Because 
nature — that is, fate — justifies the words and conduct 
of the wise openly in the sight of all, and as openly 
condemns folly by punishing it. 

The destiny of mankind tHen, after all said, hangs 
and turns on the hinges of individual human conduct; 
on personal goodness, and the normal increase of the 
number of individuals who are personally good. Fa- 
natics sigh for some impossible higher exhibition of indi- 
vidual goodness, some abnormal display of superhuman 
qualifications for a normal terrene life. The wise anti- 
cipate only an increase of human goodness in the gross ; 



806 THE DESTINY OF MAN. [LECT. 

a perfect sum total of earthly goodness ; when none 
shall be better than the best who have already lived, 
but when all shall be good, and thus consent and con- 
cur to keep all good. Let the wise and good breed 
many children in their own likeness, and let the seed of 
the ungodly perish. So, and so only, shall the earth be 
filled with the glory of the Lord, as the waters fill the 
sea. 

But what is goodness ? 

Anon ! Anon ! That requires illustrations, and we 
must pursue our train of thought a little further. 

There is a distinction to be drawn between the phys- 
ical and spiritual destinies of mankind, although they 
are so intimately interwoven that they must be real- 
ized together. For Manicheism is absurd, and the last 
traces of Asceticism are disappearing from the morning 
sky. We are followers of St. Paul, not of St. Anthony. 
The time comes when all fakirs and dervishes will be 
committed to houses of correction, with Italian organ- 
grinders and book-agents. The flesh is as good as it 
is beautiful, as good and as beautiful as the mind and 
soul, and much more easily saved. But the flesh exists 
only for the life that is in it, and beauty should be only 
the garb of goodness. 

The physical destiny of each individual man, then, is 
to eat and live, to propagate children and die. 

The physical destiny of mankind as a whole, may be 
stated in the same terms. It is at least true that the 
physical sciences predict with absolute confidence the 
coming of a time, however remote from the present age, 
when the sun will cease to shine, water to flow, grass to 
grow, and man to exist as a terrestrial animal; in which 
most remote and undatable catastrophe, however, his- 
torical and philanthropic philosophers can hardly be 
expected to interest themselves. 

Nearer and dearer topics of meditation absorb us : — 
the growth of virtue in man and woman, the welfare of 
separate communities, the good ordering of local gov- 
ernments, the preservation or premature decay and pos- 
sible extinction of races in detail, and the spring" and 
spread of benignant influences, ameliorating the cares 



Xn.] THE DESTINY OF MAN. 307 

and sorrows of men of every race, in every quarter of 
the globe. 

It is, in fact, the possible enhancement of human 
virtue and human happiness which instigates the good 
to action, generates a true public spirit, makes reform- 
ers, martyrs, and philosophers merry, and indicates the 
character of that millennial age, the very name of 
which is to most minds the equivalent of human 
destiny. 

But, in this sense, the destiny of a man and the des- 
tiny of mankind are terms which at first sight bear 
different and opposite meanings ; although on further 
observation these meanings will be seen to resolve 
themselves into one and the same, — in materials, proc- 
ess of manufacture, and final use. 

What, asks the Westminster Catechism, is the chief 
end of man? 

Answer : The chief end of man is to glorify God and 
enjoy him forever. 

In no case is this chief end of a man's existence on 
earth likely to be wholly and perfectly fulfilled; for 
individual perfection is hindered at the commencement 
of life by inherited defects of both material and con- 
struction ; and throughout the whole course of life by 
defects of education and untoward circumstances. 

The theological doctrine of original sin is plainly a 
fanciful portraiture of the hereditary disabilities under 
which each human being is ushered upon the stage of 
life — disabilities which are undeniable facts, and uni- 
versally felt to be so. 

The Oriental saying quoted by Jesus in his conver- 
sation with the young man of the Gospels: "Why call- 
est thou me good ? There is none good save God,"' is 
merely an exaggeration or forensic generalization of 
those imperfections, so numerous and so disabling, 
which every human being has been compelled to recog- 
nize in his own behavior, in childhood, in middle life, 
and in old age alike. 

Yet " be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is per- 
fe-'t " must be a command based upon some sound and 
general condition of things in this world, and is in fact 



308 THE DESTINY OP MAN. [LECT. 

fully justified by the near approach, to perfect manhood, 
or likeness to the highest ideal of mankind, actually 
made by multitudes of men and women in every gen- 
eration. 

It is evidently as possible for a man or a woman to 
be perfectly good, as it is possible for a cow, under the 
most favorable circumstances, to fulfil all her righteous- 
ness, or for an exceptionally fine horse to run the 
mortal career of an absolutely typical or inodel horse, 
or for a monkey to be as complete and perfect a mon- 
key as could be got up by any creator on the basis of 
such and such "generic and specific characters. 

But it is equally evident that the very perfection of 
a cow lies in her laziness, without which she would be 
lean and tough and milkless ; that the perfection of a 
horse culminates in his stupidity, without which man 
would find it impossible to manage his fiery strength. 
The perfection of a monkey is its sinfulness, its insane 
passion for mischief, an abandon of curiosity tormenting 
to the surrounding animal world. That of the tiger is his 
cruelty and craft and treachery and deceit. That of a 
snake is its venom and ability to fascinate and swallow 
pitilessly birds and small quadrupeds; that of a fish, 
to gluttonize on shoals of its own offspring; that of the 
eagle, to rob ewes of their lambs and pick out their eyes. 
These abilities and habitudes are the forms which 
divine perfection puts on in such creatures and also in 
man, so long as man remains a citizen of the animal 
commonwealth, and also afterward; but less and less 
as he migrates toward and finally settles in the new 
world of super-animal civility. And at last the substi- 
tution of another set of qualities changes the exhibi- 
tion of God in flesh to a more glorious fashion. 

" Be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect," 
is then a phrase carrying two very different meanings, 
corresponding to the two kinds of human goodness — 
the goodness of man as a spirited animal and the good- 
ness of man as an embodied spirit. The first kind of 
goodness being very general in the world, and the last 
kind of goodness being in Jesus' day very rare — and 
still rare enough for dogmatic purposes in our own 



Xn.] THE DESTINY OE MAN. 309 

times — Jesus commanded and prophesied ^f, not the 
other kind. 

The philosopher of the nineteenth century expects a 
millennium illustrated by both kinds of human perfec- 
tion ; not in rare cases and classes, and favored individ- 
uals and sects, but universally. All men and women 
shall in course of ages become as good, as perfect as 
horses, cows, monkeys, tigers and snakes are, and also 
as good, as perfect as Jesus was, and also as good, as 
perfect, in their kind, as God the Father is in his infi- 
nite, comprehensible, and unmistakable way. 

In other words, the lower and the higher natures of 
all mankind — physique and intellect, passions and 
aspirations — shall both of them be cultivated to per- 
fection, universally, under every possible variety of cir- 
cumstance, stirpal and personal, tribal, national, com- 
munal, and familiar. The breeding of man will become 
as high an art as the breeding of plants or cattle. 
And this art must apply itself with the same conscien- 
tious closeness to the various utilities of man-kind as to 
the various utilities of cattle-kind and plant-kind. Beg- 
garly science that, to make all men alike and all 
women alike, in making them perfect as God is perfect ! 
The stars must differ still in glory after the differ- 
ent species of glow-worms have become stars. The 
glory of each will be, that it will shine its own kind of 
light. Creeds cannot manage this sort of thing. No 
technical doctrine of goodness and badness can cast so 
much as a rushlight along so vast a vista as that of the 
future — mankind perfectly arranged according to all 
the human qualities and all their uses ; each qualitj^ 
being good for its appropriate uses, and each use being 
good in its appropriate circumstances, and bad only 
when out of time and tune in the orchestra. Some 
men are born fifes and D flutes, and others are born 
diapason pipes and ophicleides, and others clanging 
cymbals or kettle-drums, and some delicate violins or 
superb 'cellos, or martial bugles and cornets, or soul- 
ravishing French horns; and some are the voices of 
angels who have come unperceived to listen to the con- 
cert, and stayed to partake in it. 



310 THE DESTINY OF MAN^. [LBCT. 

By all these are the Composer's thoughts turned into 
music. But in each reside ^possibilities of harmony and 
discord ; and these possibilities realize themselves in 
what we call human goodness and human badness. If 
the music call for harmony, then discord is bad. But 
if the music call for discord, then harmony becomes 
bad. Good and evil change places. And this is the 
key to the right interpretation of human history. And 
this is also the test of reason in any system of ethics ; 
of divinity in any religious creed. It certainly domi- 
nates the true logic of human depravity ; for the ques- 
tion is not, Are all men sinners ? but. Is all sin sin ? 

To discuss sin, one must begin with original sin. All 
sin is in fact original, just as all virtue is original, since 
both issue like wind from the pipes of the organ, man ; 
for the wind has no music when it is blown into the 
pipes, but the reed in the pipe originates the music. 
Each of its own kind, true or false, good or bad, accord- 
ing as it is made and tuned, and not otherwise. 

The doctrine of original sin might be argued for from 
small to large, from the defects in every baby born 
to the brutality of savage populations and the prevalent 
vices of cities. But it is demonstrated by those results 
of archseological research which have been described 
in Lecture VI. on the early Social Life of Man : — 
no age of gold, no Adamic Eden ; cave-dwellers of the 
Stone ages, oscillating to and fro in front of the polar 
ice ; invaded, driven back, extinguished or absorbed by 
succeeding races of equally barbarous metal-workers 
of the bronze and iron ages ; fdllowed by civilizations 
abortive, cultivating superstitions hideous; from all 
which arose, in the last times, true learning and genuine 
humanity. 

No man has been good, no race has not deserved the 
name of bad. Yet God was at first and afterward and 
all the time good, and his nature sweet and true. For 
man, all God's plans and performances were only tenta- 
tive and preparatory, but how prophetic ! 

Good! There we have a Joseph's coat of many 
colors. 

Crood! All things have been always good and right. 



Xn.] THE DESTINY OP MAN. 311 

For mankind is a thing. And every man is a thing. 

What, then, must we mean by good ? 

In the eye of science, philosophy and Optimism, the 
arranged is good, the disarranged is bad. Filth is mat- 
ter out of place. Sin is intemperance, disobedience, 
irrationality, inconsistency, imperfection, incomplete- 
ness. 

Nothing can be teleologically good until it is finished. 
Nothing can be scientifically bad, if it be going on unto 
completion. To move is to live ; and life has the seed 
of the perfect in it, although it doth not yet- appear 
what it shall be. 

In the last analysis, the had turns out to be the 
inconvenient. But it is quite convenient to itself and 
to its generating element. For all else, it is inconven- 
ient, and therefore bad. The young wolf is good to the 
old wolf, but bad to the ewe and its lamb. Weeds are 
beneficent to the waste land, to the rivers that drain 
their reservoir of rain-water, to the soil they protect 
from erosion, to the birds they feed with seeds, whose 
nests they supply with timber, to the botanist whose 
heart they rejoice; but the farmer sees in them a curse 
for Adam's sin. " Thorns and briars shall it produce, 
and in the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread " he 
murmurs, as he pulls them up and crushes them under 
stones, as evil and only evil, and that continually. 

Can we say less of the Bedouin, "that wicked 
race " of Egyptian literature, the Kurd, the Miaotze, or 
the red Indian? Have not barbarians been thorns in 
the side of every local civilization? Yet hold not al! 
barbarous tribes from Nature a freehold right to habi- 
tation, and Nature's passport of citizenship? Is not 
Nature's segis of protection thrown over them as effec- 
tively as over classic Greece and Rome ? Where are 
Babylon and Memphis now ? Were they good because 
they were seats of learning and centres of art ? Where 
now is that Jerusalem, tlie Holy City, the delight of 
the whole earth? 

If, then, Nature lovingly protects the bad, God must 
love the bad; or — man is mistaken as to what is bad. 

Both are true. God loves and cherishes as good 



312 THE DESTINY OP MAN. [LECT. 

much that man designates and denominates the bad. 
Jesus taught this in parables, and science explains his 
parables. 

When Jesus turned to the woman and said unto her, 
" Go in peace, thy sins are forgiven thee : sin no more " 
he expressed the central truth of human wisdom — that 
the good is the convenient, and the bad the inconven- 
ient. The tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of 
good and evil grow side by side. In the vernacular, the 
good is proper and the evil improper. Proper to what ? 
Proper to its own time and circumstances ; that is, con- 
venient. To kill a tiger is heroic, to kill a monkey is 
shameful, to kill a slave detestable. No words can 
express our horror of the thumbscrew and faggot; but 
we have only terms of admiration for the dentist's tools 
and the moxa. And yet good men have been inquisi- 
tors, sportsmen, members of Vigilance Committees. 
The question is. Did they know what they were doing? 
The last words of Jesus were, " Father, forgive them, 
for they know not what they do." Who ? Even they 
who howled, " Away with this fellow from the earth." 
Was it because he was so supremely good ? No : it was 
because he could not look upon them as so very bad. 
They were, in fact, men who loved their wives, their 
children and their country, — good citizens, as the times 
went, but semi-civilized. They had not yet attained. 
Their character was inchoate, foetal ; in a stage of the 
process of formation at which they were but half-made 
men. Their destiny was in mid-career. 

What is true then of animals in natural history, 
i)nd of savages and criminals in human history, must 
be true also of the evil-minded and evil-doers with 
Avhom we live. They are not bad in the eyes of God 
and of Nature in the same sense in which they seem so 
bad to us. We are easily deceived by our natural love 
of what is to us convenient. The shingle-stealer has 
certainly more right to the timber of the forest than we 
have ; for he works it for the convenience of society, 
and does no harm to any one. Yet we brand him as a 
thief, and shut him up from the light of the sun like a 
wild beast, precisely as if he had starved his family. 



XII.] THE DESTINY OF MAN. 313 

Whatever traverses our personal convenience, that is 
bad. This is the shibboleth. 

Let us take another view. Let us suppose that the 
State owned the forest, and that the shingie-cutter were 
a citizen. Is he changed? Is his conduct altered? 
Does he support his family otherwise than as before ? 
Is he less or more diligent, enduring, self-sacrificing, 
honest to the store-keeper, attentive to sick neighbors ? 
Is he less or more passionate, sober, envious, truthful, 
chaste, or profane ? The situation is unchanged. The 
man is unchanged. His deeds are the same : his 
thoughts, his words, his behavior, are just what they 
were before. Yet, strange to say, he is now no longer 
a thief, but an honest fellow and good citizen. 

What, then, has wrought this result ? Something that 
has happened hundreds of miles away, at Harrisburg, 
or in Philadelphia. An idea has slipped from men's 
minds and been replaced by another idea. 

Another case : A poor man in a city steals a loaf of 
bread, because he has had no work and his children are 
crying for something to eat. He is a thief, a beggar, a 
miscreant. He is arrested, tried, convicted, and sent 
to jail.* 

But suppose a change of ideas in the minds of the 
people of that city to take place. Instead of the idea 
that the thief is a public enemy, suppose the idea that he 
is the public's Avard. Instead of the idea that the con- 

* Tuesday, Feb. 22, 1881, the coroner was informed of a dead 
body in a house near Milwaukee in Wisconsin. He found a mother 
ill on the ninth day after her confinement. The child had been 
dead two days. Four children under ten years of age, with herself, 
had had no food for forty-eight hours, except scrapings from an old 
swill-barrel, which had formerly been used in carrying slops from a 
distillery. Ernst Lutz, the father, was in jail, awaiting trial for 
stealing an old harness. On the previous day, he had finished a 
term of sixty days, at the house of correction for a petty offence, 
and was arrested again as he left the jail. 

The blind philanthropy of modern ideas refused to whip for the 
"petty offence," and death and starvation was its reward. Thrust 
the inconvenient by all means out of sight for sixty days, and again 
for sixty days. But the baby will die, and the mother and chil- 
dren starve. No matter. Thrust the inconvenient out of sight, — ■ 
it is intolerable, it is bad. Bury it alive as much as possible ! 



314 THE DESTINY OF MAN. [LECT. 

venience of society means that of the shrewd, active, 
and well-to-do political, mercantile, and artisan classes, 
suppose the idea to become prevalent that the con- 
venience of society means the regulated welfare of old 
and 3^oung, rich and poor, sick and well, shrewd and 
simple, ill and well born, ill and well educated, each 
and all alike. Suppose that out of this idea some ad- 
mirable municipal organization of property and labor 
should be made to include some cunning organization 
of the feebler and more vicious classes of society for 
strengthening and bettering them. Suppose that the 
same philanthropy should be applied to vice and want 
that is, in some good degree, already applied to disease 
and insanity. In a word, and for the sake of specimen, 
suppose that there were a municipal store-house to 
which the man who stole that loaf might betake him- 
self, — go and take his loaf of bread, not from the pri- 
vate baker but from the public bakery, and pay for it 
by presenting a due-bill ticket redeemable by one or 
more hours of labor for the public convenience ; by 
sweeping the streets, carting refuse, cleaning sewers, 
building levees and wharves, dredging channels, car- 
rying bricks for public buildings, keeping parks in 
order, serving as supernumerary messenger, police, 
hospital servant, etc. until he could earn his bread in 
his usual, regular and private way. Would he then 
be a thipf ? Yet the act of carrying off the bread 
would be the same, and the use of it would be the 
same. The man would be unchanged, and his rela- 
tions to society would be unchanged. 

The change would be in our ideas of the moral qual- 
ity of one of his million acts. He was a bad man 
because he committed a bad act. The act is no longer 
bad, therefore the man is no longer a bad man. Soci- 
ety retaining its first idea was inconvenienced, and 
clapped him in jail. Society having got another idea 
is not inconvenienced, and calls him a good and useful 
citizen. 

Let us look at all this a little closer, for it lies at the 
bottom of all discussions upon the Destiny of Man. 

To return to the shing'le-cutter. Does he believe that 



XII.] THE DESTINY OP MAN. 315 

he is a thief? By no means. He breathes the air and 
commits no theft, for God gives the atmosphere to all. 
He drinks the water and commits no theft, for God 
distils rain from the sea for the life of all. He cuts the 
forest and thinks that he commits no theft, for he sees 
that God has spread it ont over the earth; and why not 
for the good of all? The tree he cuts would otherwise 
rot and fall and disappear, and be of use to none. He 
utilizes it for some farmer's roof in the low country. Is 
it any one man's special property? Whose? Who 
made it ? Has any one planted or watered it ? No one 
but God. Then God alone owns it, and all that God 
owns he gives to mankind, — to the man who will make 
good use of it. It is his by first right. The air to him 
who breathes it, the water to him who drinks it, the 
tree to him who cuts it, the soil to him who farms it. 

In all past ages these common possessions of the race 
have been claimed in specialty by the rapacious, the 
powerful, and the cunning ; seized upon by force of 
arms, and held by acts of legislation. But legislation 
based on barbarous or semi-civilized ideas can neither 
certify truths nor qualify rights. And the shingle-cut- 
ter feels this in his heart of hearts, and acts accord- 
ingly. The same inward inspiration has made the slave 
a thief in every age and clime. 

Does the shingle-cutter appropriate a tree upon his 
neighbor's farm ? He would scorn the act. Why ? 
Because he feels that every tree on a farm belongs actu- 
ally," truly and of right reason, to the farmer who works 
that farm ; to touch it would be theft, and he is no 
thief. If he felt that the claim of ownership of a tree 
in the unbroken forest by a man in Philadelphia who 
had never set his foot upon it or lifted his finger to use 
it, was a genuine, just and reasonable claim, he would 
respect it also. He cannot enforce his denial of the 
justness of the claim in the face of law courts and 
prisons, backed by the arined force of the State, wielded 
by the man in Philadelphia ; but, denying it all the 
same, he evades it all the same, and repudiates the 
charge of theft against himself. 

There are two kinds of theft then : theft which the 



316 THE DESTINY OF MAN. [LECT. 

mind and heart of every man recognizes to be theft: — 
the robbery or spoliation by one man of that which 
another really and truly owns, according to the laws of 
God and nature; — and theft constructive: the appro- 
priation by one man of what he rightly or wrongly be- 
lieves not truly owned by others, although claimed by 
one or more. 

Against the first kind of theft the thunders of Sinai 
rolled, and all society wars ; it is the destiny of man 
to abolish it. 

Against the second kind of theft the statute-books of 
Christendom are written, and the overwhelming forces 
of the organized communities of the nineteenth century 
wage cruel and protracted warfare. It is the destiny of 
man to abolish this kind of theft also, but not in conse- 
quence of that warfare ; still less by the petty successes 
gained in that campaign. 

All crime is theft. All the crimes and vices of man- 
kind resolve themselves into theft. The whole moral 
law was uttered against one sin, theft. God recognizes 
but one class of criminals among his creatures, — the 
robber. 

The enemy of God and nature is that thing, that 
creature, that man who disturbs good order by living 
not of his own and in his own, but in and of and 
from and by another's. To give is the privilege; to 
steal is the crime. 

Murder is the theft of another's life ; and the worst 
of thefts, because repentance is vain and restitution 
impossible. 

Adultery is the theft of another's wife ; and the next 
worst of crimes, because it robs the heart and invades 
and destroys the very nucleus of civilization, the 
family. 

Fornication is theft ; for it robs the woman of her 
honor, and her relatives of a part of their standing in 
society. 

Slander and false-witnessing are accursed, because 
they are raids upon society ; burglary and petty larceny 
in the street and in the home; filching and stealing 
the most personal of all property, a man's good charac- 



XII.] THE DESTINY OF MAN, 317 

ter and standing before the community ; on the loss of 
which he had better die, than live compassionated by 
his friends, mistrusted by his companions, feared b}'- 
the feeble and despised by the strong. 

Lying is theft. It robs men of what they have a 
right to know. It forces upon their acceptance false 
coin with which to carry on the business of life, causing 
them to fail of the success to which they are entitled. 

Blasphemy and obscenity are theft. They rob men 
of the pure air which they have a right to breathe, and 
of the honest thoughts which they have a right to 
enjoy. 

Envy and covetousness are theft essential ; theft pure 
and simple ; theft in the seed and in the bud ; the very 
soul and force of all the outward forms of rapine and 
murder which the laws of human society are invented 
and enforced to suppress. 

But observe — and observe it well, for this is the 
kernel in the nut — murder is not theft, if the murdered 
man forfeits his right to live ; nor adultery, if the hus- 
band's right of ownership be bad ; nor fornication, if 
the man and woman wholly own themselves, as on a 
desert island ; nor slander and false-witness, if the libel 
be a truth ; nor lying, if the listener have no right to 
know ; nor blasphemy and obscenity, if they be so only 
according to the superstition and impure interpretation 
of the judges ; nor envy and covetousness, if they be 
directed to what is common property, with enough for 
all and plenty to spare. 

In other words, these terrible names for real crimes 
are not to be applied by mistake, by popular clamor, by 
superstition, by fear, favor and unrighteous legislation, 
by selfish interest, by illogical inference and narrow 
prejudice. Alas, the crimes are real and too prevalent. 
The names are justly bestowed — but not always. How 
we can guard the virtues from having forced upon 
them this nomenclature of the vices is the question of 
the future. And how we can spread the knowledge of 
the true order of things is the true destiny of man. 

The bigot calls the pure and holy testimony of the 
Quaker and the Moravian blasphemy. For, says he, it 



318 THE DESTINY OF MAN. [LECT. 

robs God of liis glory, the Church of her lambs, and the 
priesthood of its power to loose and bind. 

The Mormon, or the Turk, denounces the wife (one of 
many) who leaves his hareem and marries another man, 
as an adulteress, and shoots or stabs her new husband 
as a seducer. 

Society brands as a harlot the innocent and guileless 
girl who yields to a false promise of marriage ; hunts 
her to distraction and death, and rewards her betrayer 
with the presidency of a railroad or insurance company, 
or sends him to Congress to make laws for the good of 
the land and the hastening of the Millennium. 

Society would utter a cry of horror, and punish if it 
dared with confiscation and imprisonment the author of 
a book unveiling the debaucheries of good society; 
while it proffers all the resources of the press and of 
the post to the publication and transportation of the 
vilest writings of Paul de Kock or Balzac, while it per- 
secutes in a hundred ways Anthony Comstock, the only 
man in the largest city of the Union who devotes his 
life to the suppression of obscenity. 

And what else can we make out of that legal rule, 
" The greater the truth the greater the libel," but a 
government device to protect fraud and vice by giving 
the vice-name of slander to the virtue of uttering whole- 
some truth for the purpose of guarding honest people 
against rogues ? To rob a rogue of his character is no 
robbery ; it is unmasking the wolf in the sheep-fold. 

While all crimes are merely species of one genus, — 
theft — theft is only theft against a just ownership. 
The acknowledged ownerships of savage society are 
mostly genuine ; the legislative ownerships of civilized 
communities are many of them equally genuine and 
allowed by all; but many of them are fictitious, en- 
acted by the privileged for special classes, and are 
secretly disowned and rebelled against by the multitude. 

Hence the majority of committed crimes. 

Hence the periodical rebellions and insurrections of 
the many against the few. 

Hence elaborate codes of arbitrary laws, the educa- 
tion of professional lawyers, the enrolment of standing 



XII.] THE DESTINY OF MAS. 319 

armies, the elevation of gibbets and multiplication of 
prisons, the precipitate of a pariah class, the wancler- 
TDgs of a host of tramps, infinite land, litigation, the 
ruin of families on the foreclosure of mortgages, the 
ever-increasing population of alms-houses, the organiza- 
tion of labor against capital, and the spread of social- 
istic doctrines all based on one idea — La propriete^ 
c'est le vol. 

Has it then come to this ? Is the destiny of man to 
be a houleversement of the divine law of property, on 
which all true civilization has been, is now, and must 
forever continue to be based ? 

Property theft I Nay, the theft of property is theft. 
And, if mankind have any one definite destiny it must 
be to demonstrate this in theory, and to organize in all 
parts of the habitable world the right applications of 
this theory to the practices of life. 

What men own and what they do not and cannot 
own ; what women own and do not own ; what children 
own and how far their rights of property are merged 
in or limited by the property of their parents; what 
society owns, to the extinction of individual rights, and 
what it only claims to own, without any right but that 
of might ; what are the periods, qualities, quantities 
and guarantees of all these species of propriety; and 
what are the methods by which their public statement 
and record, and their private and popular recognition 
can be formulated, so that misunderstanding and strife 
may cease — these are the highest themes of the philos- 
ophy of the future. 

These have always been and are now the main topics 
of human conversation. 

But desultory conversation, the gossip of neighbors, 
the objurgation of litigants, the scandalous cross-exam- 
inations of witnesses, special pleadings at the bar, and 
literal precedents of the bench, newspaper editorials, 
partisan political pamphlets, discussions at board meet- 
ings, riotous speeches at the polls, fourth of July ora- 
tions, inaugural gubernatorial and presidential ad- 
dresses, legislative debates, and sectarian sermons — all 
these ordinary and universally abundant means for ven- 



320 THE DESTINY OF MAN. 

tilating the thoughts and feelings of the human race 
have failed hitherto, and fail habitually to settle the 
rights of human property. 

Because the foundation itself must be deep and per- 
manent on which a stable edifice is to be erected ; and 
no such sound and natural theory of human rights has 
been agreed upon as will safely bear the vast and com- 
posite edifice in which the laws of practical right and 
wrong are hereafter to be administered. 

Church and State, monarchies and republics, alike, 
continue to take for granted the revelations and inspira- 
tions of the past. God owns absolutely everything and 
man nothing. The man everything and the wife and 
child nothing — but of his free gift. The State has em- 
inent domain, and every individual must buy of the 
State. The Church has a monopoly of truth, and the 
individual is a beggar at the church-door. The right to 
amass wealth is unlimited, and the inept in body, mind 
or heart is a tolerated or beneficed client — nothing 
more. 

How, upon these cyclopean foundation walls, laid in 
the centuries gone by, can the New Jerusalem be built 
and all the sons and daughters of God be gathered 
into it? 

New foundations can Science only lay: — science, 
that revelation of God in nature to and for the 
whole human race, and not to any individual human 
being. Social order will be a gradual experimental, 
analytical and synthetic discovery, like astronomical 
order, or geological order, or any other generalization 
of physical phenomena. It will not be invented, but 
found out. It will grow slowly, secretly and openly, 
and spread this way and that. By degrees rights and 
wrongs will reveal themselves. By degrees men will 
know what they own and what they do not. Then 
there will be justice, and peace on earth and good-will 
among men. 



LECTURE XIII. 

THE PHYSICAL DESTTNT OF THE EACE. 

The destiny of mankind depends in a physical sense 
on the permanence of its "habitation; upon the continu- 
ance of favorable circumstances in air, land and water ; 
upon the maintenance of a proper temperature ; upon 
geological changes which may happen to alter the sea- 
level and multiply or diminish the number and size of 
lakes ; upon the copiousness of harvests in fertile parts, 
the possible reclamation of deserts, the preservation of 
forests, the colonization of plants and animals and the 
culture of useful fish ; upon the inexhaustibility of 
mineral deposits; upon the practice of medicine and 
the knowledge of hygiene ; upon the adjustment of 
property and the use of accumulated wealth ; upon the 
equal distribution of handicrafts, the applications of 
machinery, the multiplication of the lines of commerce, 
and the prevalence of national friendship; upon the 
simplification of language, the extension of primary 
education, the elevation of the intellect of the whole 
race, the number of men of genius, and the adoption 
of pure religion. 

The Astronomical future of our globe will depend 
upon the results of actions taking place in the Sun. 
The earth will hardly be affected by the planets much 
more than it is now. We know of no causes likely to 
alter their masses or orbits. Their distances from us 
will remain constant, and their heat, light and attrac- 
tion be alike unimportant. But indirectly they will 
continue to influence the earth by their effects upon 
the Sun. 



322 THE PHYSICAL DESTINY OF THE RACE. [lECT. 

It is now understood that when the larger planets 
collect upon one side of the Sun they produce a marked 
change in the number and size of its spots, although 
the precise nature or mode of operation eludes inquiry. 
It has also become an accepted fact that the maxima 
and minima of sun-spot area agree with the maxima and 
minima of magnetic force upon the earth, of auroral 
displays, of mean temperature, of rainfall ; probably of 
plenty and famine ; and possibly of epidemic disease.*. 

A connection between the sun-spot cycle of eleven 
years and the cyclones of the Indian Ocean has been 
attempted by Mr. Meldrum of the Mauritius Observa- 
tory, while the Indian meteorologists Archibald, Blan- 
ford, Broun, the two Chambers, Eliot and Hill have 
sought in the sun-spot period some explanation for the 
droughts and famines of that densely populated penin- 
sula. Frederick Chambers attributed the high barome- 
ter and deficient rainfall of 1877 to less sun-radiation 
not piling the atmosphere at the equator. Dr. Hunter- 
connected the sun-spots with the famines through the 
barometer, thus : — ■ 

1. Variations of the solar-spotted area are succeeded 
months afterwards by corresponding abnormal baro- 
metric variations, a high barometer corresponding to a 
minimum of sun spots. 

2, Famines follow in the wake of curves of high 
barometric pressure. 

The approach of famines may probably be foreseen by 
the immediate publication of continuous observations 
of the state of the sun's face, and by immediate publi- 
cation of barometric observations in high and low lati- 
tudes. This great work is already becoming not only 
national, but international, and must needs become a 
complete and perfect system all over the globe. f 

* See Baxendell's researches in 1878-9, Manchester. 

I Meldrum's observations show by observations at thirty-seven 
stations in his district that the rainfall is greater about times of 
maximum sun-sjjot frequency. Meldrum's and Poey's observations 
seem to show the same of cyclonic storms both in the Indian Ocean 
and Carribean Sea. Balfour Stewart has recently seen reason 
to believe that sun-spot inequalities of short duration are fol- 



Xni.] THE PHYSICAL DESTINY OF THE EACE. 323 

The Meteorological future of our globe could be safely 
predicted were its past records at our command in any- 
thing like a complete and intelligible shape. But these 
records are, on the contrary, signally deficient and sin- 
gularly obscure. 

We have but two criteria to judge of the climate of 
prehistoric ages : 1. the former extent of ice- and snow- 
fields ; and 2. the former healthy existence of animals 
and plants in regions which they no longer inhabit. 

When Scandinavia was buried under a solid and con- 
tinuous sheet of ice as Greenland is for the most part 
now, and icebergs drifted over an arctic sea outspread 
upon the plain of Northern and Eastern Germany, and 
dropped their blocks of granite as far south as Leipzig 
in Saxony * ; when all Canada was similarly covered, 
and all New England, with ice so thick that its sloping 
surface stood above the highlands of southern New 
York and north-western Pennsylvania, twenty-five hun- 
dred feet above the sea, filling the great basin in which 
lakes Ontario, Erie, and Huron now lie, and projecting 
glaciers through low places in Ohio and Indiana as far 
southward as the Ohio river, and in one place (in west- 
ern Kentucky) even beyond that river; leaving on its 
retreat a whole zone of the continent covered with frag- 
ments, sand, and mud ; reconstructing the surface to- 
pography ; and dotting our maps with innumerable 
small lakes and ponds, caught in these Northern Drift 



lowed by corresponding inequalities in the diurnal temperature 
range of Toronto in Canada, in such a way that a large amount of 
sun-spots slightly precedes a large temperature range. Sabine long 
ago showed that the diurnal oscillations of the magnetic needle are 
greatest about times of maximam sun-spots, lagging behind them, 
so that " magnetic weather " also travels from west to east. With 
all this agree the spectroscopic observations of Lockyer and others 
and the actinometric results of J. H. Hennessey in India. The 
question (raised by Professor Stokes), if a greater amount of sol9.r 
spots denotes a greater solar activity, seems in a fair way of being 
answered affirmatively. But the question of true periodicity is not 
well answered yet ; there may be variability with true periodicity. 
(See B. Stewart in Nature, p. 237, 1881.) 

*The most recent memoir on thy subject however extends the 
ice sheet itself as far south as Leipsig. 



324 THE PHYSICAL DESTINY OF THE RACE. [LECT. 

deposits — tlie climate of the globe must certainly have 
been of a very different temper from that of our day. 

If the Scandinavian ice-age were different from the 
Canadian ice-age in point of time, we might ascribe its 
phenomena to largely acting local causes, not affecting 
the globe as a whole. But it is difficult to find marks 
of such a distinction. Most geologists believe that 
Canada and Scandinavia, Scotland and the north of 
England and Wales, lay buried at one time beneath a 
sheet of moving ice. Siberia shows no distinct traces 
of this ice, and was probably left bare. But the Ural 
chain was covered ; and modern glaciers in the Altai 
range present themselves as remnants of a similar ice- 
sheet covering Mongolia and western China. The 
Tien-shan, the Pamian plateau, and the northern Hima- 
layas probably escaped for want of moisture, as they do 
now, in spite of their great elevation. But the Alps 
and the Pyrenees had their covering of ice, the north- 
ern edge of which flowed down over Switzerland, and 
banked itself against the Jura Mountains ; while its 
southern edge invaded Piedmont and Lombardy nearly 
to Turin and Milan, and beyond Verona. Probably all 
Languedoc and Provence were covered for the short 
time during which the outspread was at its maximum ; 
for Desor has recently discovered moraines just back of 
Nice ; and reindeer, polar bears, gluttons, and hairy 
mammoths prowled and browsed in southern France. 

The recent survey of British Columbia has shown a 
similar ice-spread over the two mountain ranges and 
intermediate valley-land of the Pacific coast and Vancou- 
ver's Island ; but Prof. Whitney's last report on Cali- 
fornia shows the glaciers of the Sierra Nevada as always 
local and unconnected. 

The cause of this prevalence of ice at one time in 
the northern hemisphere is still disputed. Glacial ice 
is made out of snow. Snow falls only along the paths 
taken by winds saturated with moisture evaporated 
from the sea surface. In the bitterly cold winter 
climate of Minnesota and British Columbia, swept by 
dry air, the snow-fall is so light that the Canada Pacific 
railway will be easily worked. To get into the heavy 



XIII.] THE PHYSICAL DESTINY OF THE RACE. 325 

snow belt we must go south toward Colorado and New 
Mexico. The balance between evaporation and frost in. 
the Glacial Age must have turned in favor of the for- 
mer, whether the real mean temperature of the globe 
was higher or lower then than now. There must have 
been extra evaporation, a more constantly saturated 
atmosphere, whether the lower strata of the air were 
extra cold or not. 

Did this excess of evaporation come from a larger 
sea-surface ? Certainly not in the case of Europe ; nor 
in the case of British Columbia ; nor have we any cer- 
tain evidence of the submergence of the Mississippi 
basin at that time. 

Was the excess of evaporation caused by a temporary 
access of solar energy ; operating upon the oceanic 
areas as we know them, in the southern and equatorial 
regions, and saturating the northern frigid zone ? 

The sentiment of geologists, physicists, and palae- 
ontologists, in favor of an extra cold mean climate of 
the northern hemisphere in the ice-age is pronounced. 
But there is danger of reasoning in a circle. The re- 
mains of the reindeer in southern France, of the walrus 
in South Carolina, are good evidence of an arctic cli- 
mate at the edges of the ice-covered areas, but not of 
a general ]ow mean temperature of the arctic zone as 
a whole. 

If the Glacial Age, however, was really one of uni- 
versal arctic cold, it may have been also one of uni- 
versal antarctic heat. When Canada was buried under 
ice, the now concealed antarctic continent may have 
been a land of the fig and the grape, crowded with 
animal life. 

This is the picture drawn by Mr. Croll, the inventor 
of an astronomical cause for the phenomenon under 
review. The ellipticity of the earth's orbit not being 
constant, there recur periodic times when the earth 
approaches to within eighty millions of miles, and re- 
cedes to one hundred and ten millions of miles from the 
sun. When at such a time of maximum orbital elonga- 
tion, the nutation of the earth's axis turns the north 
pole away from the sun at the apogee, many extra cold 



326 THE PHYSICAL DESTINY OF THE RACE. [LECT. 

winters and extra hot summers must follow each other 
in succession. ' Those who support Mr. CroU's hypoth- 
esis calculate on an accumulation then of the annual 
winter's cold in excess of the accumulation of annual 
summer's heat, for covering the north slowly with ice. 

Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace in his " Island Life " 
adopts this view in a modified form, but lays more 
stress upon concurrent changes of land- and sea-areas. 
Others see greater difficulties in the way of accepting 
it arising from a fact which presses most upon the 
attention of geologists : viz. the absence of geological 
evidence of recurring glacial ages. Recently indeed 
pre-Cambrian glaciation has been noticed in Scotland ; 
and there are marks of glaciation of a Permian age. 
But other recurrences have not been noticed ; whereas 
at every 21,000 years of the history of the globe the 
phenomenon should have left its traces. 

Whatever may have been the cause of this state of 
things in the last ice age several thousand years have 
passed (some would have it 10,000, others 200,000) 
without the repetition of any such flagrant departure 
from the order of sunlight and solar heat which Earth 
enjoys ; and many thousand more will probably roll by 
without disturbance to the human race from this capital 
but obscurely comprehended cause. Whatever destiny 
the race is to have will be accomplished in full before 
the improved spectroscopes and thermopiles of the 
future shall have detected, much less measured, a sec- 
ular diminution of favor in 'that royal countenance by 
the grace of which all earthly animated things continue 
to live and move and have their beginning. 

The meteorological future of man's dwelling-place 
wears no sinister aspect when regarded from the stand- 
point of those who ascribe the glacial age to alterations 
in the proportion or relative positions of the areas of 
land and sea. These areas have remained practically 
unchanged since long before the dawn of monumental 
human history ; and that means at least ten thousand 
years. Therefore, for ten thousand years to come the 
mountains, plains, great rivers, and lines of sea-coast in 
all countries, and the shoals and islands of the sea, will 



Xin.] THE PHYSICAL DESTINY OF THE RACE. 32T 

probably continue to be represented in the charts of the 
distant future as they are on our best maps now ; and 
mankind will continue to work out the problem of its 
destiny on virtually the same slate which is already so 
covered with demonstrations of the past. 

Considering then the sun as fixed in its resolution to 
shine and warm, the present continents as fixed in their 
places, forms, and altitudes, and the water-basins of the 
globe as changeless and inexhaustible resources for the 
ever shifting and sliding, ascending and descending at- 
mosphere, there is no fear that the early or the later rains 
shall fail for the husbandman, that the great trades 
shall cease to blow for the sailor, or that the sunrise 
and sunset shall ever be less inspiring to the lover of 
the beautiful. Deserts will remain desert, and fertile 
regions continue to be populated; mountains will 
always bear forests, and great cities continue to be 
built along the sea. 

But storms will also always be in order, and local 
hurricanes and extraordinary waterfalls from the sky 
and uncommon wide-spread frosts or heats, causing 
bodily distress and loss of wealth to individuals, or to 
whole communities ; inundations and avalanches in 
mountain valleys, along great rivers, and upon the sea- 
coast ; tidal waves generated by earthquakes ; all dan- 
gerous to the life and happiness of man. 

But as man has been a helpless prey to these calami- 
tous gesticulations of his mother earth in past times 
because ignorant of their cause and meaning, of the 
times to expect and the safeguards to oppose to them, 
in future he will learn the premonitions of their ap- 
proach, and fearlessly provide for his own safety. This 
is the promise of the new science of Meteorology. 

Since William Blasius, after a study of the West 
Cambridge tornado in 1849, proposed to Joseph Henry 
in 1851 the plan of a meteorological Signal Service sys- 
tem, and Lorin Biodget made the first trial of one by 
telegraph for two months in 1852,* and the Smithsonian 
Institution actually accomplished it by distributing 

* Proc. Am. Phil. Soc. 1876, p. 205. 



328 THE PHYSICAL DESTINY OF THE KACE. [LECT. 

thermometers, barometers, anemometers and rain-gauges 
to volunteer observers at various points between the 
Mississippi and the seaboard, first France, then England, 
then the United States have established government 
Bureaus of Meteorology. Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, 
Germany, Austria and Russia have imitated their exam- 
ple ; and now Sweden is preparing to extend the area 
of observation by erecting one observatory at the head 
of the Gulf of Bothnia, and another in a deserted ref- 
uge on Spitzbergen. Three times a day the weather of 
all Europe and North America is telegraphed to cen- 
tral observatories and the data charted and redistrib- 
uted by mail. Storm signals are raised at all points of 
coming danger to shipping ; news of any sudden rise 
in rivers is telegraphed to points below, in advance of 
the descending freshet. Every cold wave that crosses 
the Rocky Mountains is heralded before it can reach 
Chicago and St. Louis, and its course considered and 
reported, so that the people of Canada and the Eastern 
States may be prepared ; or if it be moving southward, 
the planters of the south may protect their crops. 
When the tremendous meteor has left our coast, its 
time of probable arrival in Great Britain is telegraphed 
to Liverpool, to warn all colliers and fishing boats of its 
coming;, and every step of its subsequent career is 
noted and recorded until lost sight of beyond the 
Euxine on its way to the highlands of Persia. 

From Jamaica to Ottawa, from San Francisco to 
Sydney, from Lisbon and Algiers to within 208 of the 
north pole, and to the Indian Ocean, a thousand trained 
observers report three times a day how the winds are 
blowing and whether the sun shines, the rain falls or 
the snow drifts ; the height of the air above them, and 
the heat of the air around them. 

A century hence — the United States territory sus- 
taining a population of 200,000,000 souls, — Mexico 
having received an overflow of 50,000,000 English- 
speaking whites, — the South American savannahs illus- 
trated by half a dozen commonwealths as large and as 
civilized as any of our Northern States, — Cape colonists 
occupying southern Africa northward to the Zambezi, 



XIII.] THE PHYSICAL DESTINY OF THE RACE. 329 

— Egypt and Mesopotamia regenerated and refurnished 
by the energy of Franks with wealthy cities connected 
by railways with all the world, — the Ottoman empire 
under Greek and Austrian rule, — the Russian steppes 
illuminated by the sciences and enriched by the arts, — 
India irrigated and China reformed, — a century hence, 
the thousand trained observers of atmospheric physics 
will have become a hundred thousand, and from innu- 
merable localities, equally distributed over land and 
sea, hourly bulletins will be concentrated, to be reflected 
through the universal press upon the whole human 
race; — bulletins not merely of the movements of the 
surface air, but of the upper currents of the atmosphere ; 
for every favorable Alpine summit will be crowned 
with an observatory, and trial balloons will be regularly 
set adrift from the plains. 

Then too will be detected and charted those invisible 
streams of fertility by which the greater part of the ani- 
mal and vegetable worlds are generated and regener- 
ated ; of disease by which human populations are deci- 
mated ; of the smokes and dusts which compose a 
notable portion of the sediment in lake and ocean beds, 
and so much of the natural manure of forest and prairie. 
Mankind will be instructed how to engross their hab- 
itations on wholesome places, and how to purify the 
atmosphere of cities from noxious vapors.'* 

But the largest future profit to accrue to the race from 
a universal and perpetual study of the air may be best 
summed up in the phrase "'a true theory of storms for 
the use of sailors," the rudiments of which we already 
unmistakably possess ; but which when well perfected 
for all sea-surfaces and sea-coasts will benefit in many 
ways the ever-enlarging fleets of ships and steamers, and 
their future thousand-fold expanded living freight, f 

In Physics what wonderful discoveries have rewarded 
experimenters since the first application of the galvanic 
current to the production of mechanical movements by 

* See Blasius on the Connection of Meteorology with Health in 
Proceedings Amer. Philos. Soc. 1875, p. 667. 

fSee Blasius "On Storms," 1875.— Proc. Am. P. S. 1876, p. 198. 



330 THE PHYSICAL DESTINY OP THE RACE. [LECT. 

Joseph Henry at Princeton in 1840 ! The telegraph 
system of Morse, followed by the writing telegraph of 
House, followed in its turn by methods of relay and 
duplication, and still later by the marvellous invention 
of the phonograph and now of the still more curious and 
promising phototelephone, will certainly be extended 
into all parts of that habitable world which it already 
encircles with its aerial, subterranean and submarine 
wires. The most distant centres of business are already 
brought within a few hours' reach of each other ; the 
prices of money, bonds, commodities of all kinds, are 
regulated by instantaneous conversation in all the lan- 
guages in Christendom : travellers find themselves as 
well supported and insured against disaster thousands 
of miles from home as in their own offices ; the term 
foreigner will lose its prime significance ; unwarrant- 
able or capricious insurrections become impossible ; 
criminals can no longer feel impunity from arrest 
whichever way they fly; the lost can be found, the 
truant reclaimed, the impostor gazetted in advance; 
and every new experiment at association with political, 
social or religious ends in view must become more easy 
and complete. The dismembered widely scattered 
body of Osiris has been gathered together by this Isis 
of physical science, and now first truly begins to live 
a divine life. Christendom is unified ; and its senti- 
ments, its plans, its energies so concentrated by tele- 
graphic intercommunication, that nothing on a grand 
scale will be attempted hereafter except under the 
guidance of such a discussion by all governments, by all 
the moneyed syndicates, by all classes of men of science 
and of business, as must surely result in the best choice 
of methods and means, at the least possible outlay of 
the capitalized wealth of the world.* 

* The three telephone companies of Paris have just been consoli- 
dated into one, and place given in the sewers for wires enough to 
serve fifteen thousand subscribers, through ten connected central 
offices, girls bj day and boys by night shifting the connections so as 
to answer the subscribers' calls to be placed in communication with 
each other. Branch companies and similar systems at Marseilles, 
Lyons, and Bordeaux are already in working order. The navy has 
portable wires for practice and the army will be handled by wire. 



XIII.] THE PHYSICAL DESTINY OP THE RACE. 331 

Greographical maps are intended either to inform or 
misinform society. When they lie, they lie with the 
extraordinary force of all dramatic action as compared 
with verbal statement. 

The nine-foot map of the Atlantic and Pacific Ship 
Canal Company, for instance, published in 1850, ex- 
hibited one of the most impracticable of canal-routes as 
so clear of obstacles, that the world has wondered why 
the work was not commenced; a level river valley; a 
large lake ; six locks up and six locks down, — the Pa- 
cific is reached. But in fact Lake Nicaragua lies one hun- 
dred and twenty-eight feet above the Pacific ocean and is 
separated from it by a range of active volcanoes. Berg- 
haus' great atlas shows twenty-eight on a line three hun- 
dred miles long ; with eleven more extinct ; that is, one 
volcano for every twenty-one miles ; and one of the num- 
ber, five thousand high, seated in the centre of the 
lake. In 1709, 1809, and 1835 the Cosaguina shook 
the whole Isthmus, on which it deposited a layer of 
ashes three and one-half feet deep. The French Gov 
ernment survey map of 1858 represents the proposed 
canal with its locks built into the side of an active 
volcano with a double crater ten thousand feet high ! 

Topography has improved its methods of representa- 
tion in modern days ; not as pictures pleasing to the 
eye and stimulating to the imagination (for no such 
beautiful maps are now executed as those of Italian 
geographers published two centuries ago) but as accu- 
rate delineations of real objects on the earth's surface in 
their true proportions of size and relative positions to 
each other and to the sea-level. The addition of con- 
tour-curves (showing equal heights above tide) to the 
more recent maps has been of immense value to several 
branches of science, especially to civil engineering and 
geology. The latest mapping method substitutes these 
for the old hachures for marking slope, and obtains all 
the relief which the eye demands by reinforcing them 
on the shady side. 

The invention of underground coretoitr-curves twenty 
years ago is now coming into use for mining engineer- 
ing purposes, and opens a future prospect to the geol- 



332 THE PHYSICAL desthsty of the race [lect. 

ogist of boundless extent and rich promise. The time 
must come when every mineral bed and vein, every up- 
throw and down-throw, anticlinal and synclinal, will be 
thus represented pari passu with mining operations; 
and civil engineers will follow the example of their 
brethren of the other caste in constructing underground 
contour maps of the rock-bedding in such tunnels as 
that which penetrates the Mt. Cenis, to show its folded 
structure, — that of the Innspruck and Botzen line, to 
show its core of dolomite, — and that beneath the Eng- 
lish Channel to show its fault. 

Greodesy is the application of mathematics and geome- 
try to the actual measurement of the earth ; — first, for 
the determination of its true figure, which is not per- 
fectly globular, nor regularly oblate, but slightly bat- 
tered like an old billiard-ball, or an apple in the first 
stages of decay ; — secondly, for the determination of the 
exact edges of the dry land, and the exact place of every 
watercourse ; — and thirdly, for the exact height above 
sea-level of every object attracting man's attention or 
affecting his interests — hill-tops and valley-beds, steep 
cliffs and sloping plains, houses and other monuments of 
history. 

The ordnance maps of Great Britain are on the scale 
of an inch to the mile, and of six inches to the mile, 
so that every man's house, barn and stable in the king- 
dom can be referred to on the paper. The Belgian map 
is equally precise. The Swiss map shows every foot- 
path in the Alps; and guides are unnecessary, if the 
traveller be hardy, fearless and judicious. The coast of 
the United States is nearly all mapped in the most 
minute manner ; and the chain of the great lakes ; and 
belts of inland triangulation are being carried from east 
to west across the continent. Arcs of great circles have 
been measured in South America and across Europe on 
the meridian of Paris, and through Russia. Germany 
and Austria are extending the area of this kind of 
work; Spain has lately been connected with Algeria, 
so that future surveys in Africa will have a base in 
common with the European measurements. The tri- 
angulation of India has been going on for years. 



Xrir.] TEE PHYSICAL DESTINY OP THE EACE. 333 

To all this must be added the Admiralty charts of the 
gea bottom on all coasts which the ships of Christendom 
approach ; and a beginning has been made for a general 
measurement of the ocean depths, and a complete map 
of the ocean bottom in both hemispheres. Mr. Patter- 
son has just published a map and a model of the curi- 
ous basin of the Gulf of Mexico. How it would 
rejoice the heart of the geographer to get a glimpse of 
the maps to be published in the year 1981 ! How 
many questions wait for their solution until those maps 
be constructed! Yet geodesy will be as little ex- 
hausted then as now, and the maps of A.D. 2081 and 
A.D. 2181 will differ from each other in nothing but 
completeness. 

It is not however merely the completeness of our 
knowledge of what is now that these centuries of 
geodetic work will effect. The repetitions which will 
be needful — made needful by the growth of instruments 
in precision, and by the extension and use of telegraph 
lines for time observation — will subserve quite a differ- 
ent purpose. Changes in river courses and coast lines 
have already been observed; two or three centuries 
of comparative maps can alone show the law and 
rate of these changes.* While successive land maps 
will determine the term of England's coal trade, suc- 
cessive coast maps will exhibit the rate of the destruc- 
tion of the island by the waves in some places, and the 
growth of deltas, swamps and shoals in others. The 
height of no one alpine summit is as yet told with abso- 
lute truth ; but by repeated surveys not only a close 
approximation to absolute truth will be reached for the 
top of Mt. Blanc, Monte Rosa, the Jungfrau, the Wet- 
terhorn, and hundreds of other summits, but a compari- 
son of heights so obtained in one century with heights 
obtained by remeasurements in the next century and in 
the next, will show which are the rising and which the 
settling portions of the Alps; and how and at what 
rate the warping movements range, which produce such 

* See the map of Marseilles in the time of the Romans and now 
(Bull. Soc. de Geog. Paris, 1874) showing how the Mediterranean 
has worn away the clift's. 



334 THE PHYSICAL DESTINY OF THE RACE. [LECT. 

earthquakes as those of Agram in 1880. And when 
this knowledge is far enough advanced in all the prin- 
cipal alpine districts of the earth, a comparison of data so 
obtained will teach much respecting the larger changes 
which the form of the globe is always and everywhere 
undergoing. 

In the course of many centuries men will come to 
know whether the oceans make great oscillations from 
the south pole to the north and back again ; and 
whether archipelagos be emerging from the Pacific and 
Indian seas, forefanners of wide continents, now under 
water ; or, whether they be the disappearing remnants 
of ancient continents once inhabited by aboriginal men. 

Qhemistry and Mineralogy have peculiar blessings in 
store for the human race. 

Previous to the discovery of oxygen by Priestley 
Alchemy was the rudest cookery of the inorganic con- 
stituents of the ground. Now it is one of the fine 
arts. In future it will furnish the mathematics of 
Metaphysics. 

No other science has so uplifted the right reason 
of man. No other science has been equally successful 
in teaching men to think. No other science deals so 
entirely with the Invisible, underlying and informing 
the visible creation. No other science so habitually 
feels by calculation and thinks with the imagination. 

As out of Alchemy sprang the noblest poetic fancy 
and the purest moral sentiment of the middle ages, so 
out of Chemistry has been born all that is honest, con- 
scientious, patient and prudent in the physical sci- 
ences of our own day. There is no such check to the 
vague imaginings and reckless generalizations of na- 
tural philosophers, of all kinds, as that to which they 
have been, are and more and more shall be subjected by 
the ever-enlarging scope and deep-reaching interpreta- 
tion of the intimate nature of things of this purest and 
sternest of all the spirits that represent the wisdom of 
God in nature. 

Are there any limits to human knowledge ? Is there 
any limit to the world's mysteries ? What kind of a 
being will the chemist of a thousand years hence be ? 



Xni.] THE PHYSICAL DESTINY OF THE RACE. 335 

But the answer to these questions is of interest only 
to the individual man. The interest which the mill- 
ions shall take in the chemistry of the future relates 
to the quantity and variety of the accumulating appli- 
cations of chemistry to the comfort and convenience 
of life. These cast their shadows before. Their kind 
and scope at least can be predicted. 

By chemistry mankind is destined to discover and 
put to use a great number of economic processes which 
will first cheapen and then make abundant the raw 
materials of the arts. 

Hitherto all that men have manufactured they have 
manufactured by tedious, laborious, painful, wasteful, 
and consequently costly methods. Waste — infinite, 
irrecoverable waste has characterized all crafts. Mate- 
rial was plenty, because tools were bad, and the rich 
alone could be supplied. When tools improved and 
goods became abundant and cheap, the crowd de- 
manded, and the raw material grew scarce. The prob- 
lem of the future is to wrest from nature enough stuff 
to manufacture for all. The solution of the problem is 
to be sought for in a reduction of waste to its possible 
minimum. In this search, as in all other intellectual 
paths, chemistry takes the lead. 

The chemist's whole education consists in detecting 
residua ; recovering what has tried to elude observation 
and escape ; committing every element under bail to 
keep the peace and behave itself. Chemists are the 
gendarmerie of the manufacturing world. To them has 
been consigned the task of deciphering all the adulter- 
ations of nature and art ; the qualities of the raw ore, 
and of the metal when brought to nature ; of the soil 
and the manures it needs ; of salts and infusions, and 
the drugs made from them ; of oils, and their soaps and 
acids ; of medicinal plants and their principles ; of 
paints and bleaching powders ; yeast and the bread it 
raises ; in a word every article of food which man 
grows, every fibre out of which man's clothing is woven, 
every stone man builds with, every fuel he burns, the 
clay of his potteries, the sand and alkalies which he 
turns into glass, the slag which flows from the furnace 



336 THE PHYSICAL DESTINY OF THE RACE. [LECT. 

or flies from the anvil, and th.e iron which, is rolled into 
rails. Every drug-shop has a chemical laboratory be- 
hind it. Every iron furnace keeps a chemist in employ- 
ment. Chemical experts swarm in the great mineral 
districts. Even justice acquits or condemns the mur- 
derer according to chemical analysis. The assayer 
accompanies the explorer into unknown regions ; and 
great movements of population will be governed in 
the future, as they have been in the past, by mineral- 
ogical observation confirmed by a verdict from the 
laboratory. 

But all this is nothing to the effect of chemistry on 
the future world by reason of its inventive faculty. 
While the resident chemist guides the miner and guards 
the furnace-man in the hourly progress of their ordi- 
nary work, he is devising modifications of the process of 
production, and inventing transformations of useless 
refuse into useful materials for other industries, the 
sale of which may diminish the cost of work, and insti- 
tute some new and flourishing production. As the years 
and centuries roll on, the waste of raw material will be 
eliminated from human industry, and the cost of every 
manufactured article will be reduced for the benefit of 
every class of consumers ; the percentage of return for 
labor will be increased ; time will be saved ; and savage 
methods will be replaced by scientific methods all over 
the earth. 

In Mineralogy — the transcendental aspect of which 
is of no interest to us here except for its bearing upon 
the growth of the human mind — and especially in 
Metallurgy (which is Mineralogy practised under the 
instruction of chemistry) what has just been said finds 
its illustration. 

With an unfailing abundance of two minerals, the 
destiny of man is made safe. With a hollow coal fire 
and an iron bar a man can arm himself against all ene- 
mies and equip himself for every kind of useful work : 
— with an axe to hew the forest, a chisel to cut through 
the rock, a shovel to level the road, a ploughshare to till 
the soil, nails to build his house, axle and springs to 
facilitate the transport of his goods. 



Xin.] THE PHYSICAL DESTINY OF THE RACE. 337 

The uprising of the old forest from its sleep of ages 
underground, glorified into bituminous and anthracite 
coal, was like the reappearance of the sun in a new 
morning of human history, calling an awakened world 
to fresh existence and universal activity. The use of 
coal was confined at first to the immediate vicinity of 
the outcrop of the bed. In course of time small quan- 
tities began to be carried on mules and in canoes to 
smithies at some distance. When the canal-lock was 
invented at Viterbo in 1481, and the French canals of 
Briare (1605-1642), Orleans (1675), Languedoc (1667- 
1681) and others on the Continent had led the way for 
the Duke of Bridgewater's first English canal (1758) 
and the English canal-mania, which lasted forty years, 
the foundation was laid for enormous colliery opera- 
tions and a general use of the mineral fuel. The rail- 
way-mania of the present century was a repetition of 
the canal-mania in a more intense form ; and its effect 
upon the annual production of coal has been to carry 
it up from ten million tons (in 1800) to one hundred 
and thirty-six million in 1877. Nine-tenths of this is 
consumed in Great Britain ; the remaining tenth is sent 
in ballast to all parts of the world. 

The present annual production and use of hard and 
soft mineral coal in the United States is supposed to be 
between sixty and seventy millions of tons, shared be- 
tween blast-furnaces and rolling-mills, railway locomo- 
tives, steamboats, steam-mills, gas-works, and city stoves 
and grates. 

The production of anthracite was 350 tons in 1820 ; 
850,000 in 1840; 8,500,000 in 1860; and about 25,000,- 
000 in ] 880. In spite of the enormous waste in mining 
and screening anthracite (a waste of at least 50 per 
cent, at present) there is enough in the ground to 
furnish fifty millions of tons per annum for use for 250 
years.* But the deposits of semi-bituminous and bitu- 
minous coal in the United States are of such extent, so 
undisturbed and so near the surface, that an annual 

*P. W. Sheaf er, Proc. Am. Asso. F.A.S., Saratoga, 1879. 



338 THE PHYSICAL DESTINY OF THE EACB. [LECT. 

consumption of 200,000,000 tons is possible for 10,000 
years.* 

It is supposed that the total consumption of mineral 
coal will in the present year exceed 800,000,000 tons; 
and that the extension of the railway system, the expan- 
sion of steamship commerce, and the planting of steam 
manufactures in India and China, will enlarge this con- 
sumption to a thousand million tons in less than half a 
century. 

The mechanical power of one pound of good coal 
equals that expended in one day of human hand-work. 
Most of the coal raised from under ground is burned 
for warming mankind, cooking food and making iron. 
But if only one ton of coal in every ten be consumed 
for steam machinery, Great Britain is at present using a 
machinery power equal to one year of labor performed 
by 100,000,000 men ; and the United States is using a 
machinery power of 40,000,000 men. Since the male 
adult population of the United States is about 1 0^000,000, 
coal adds the labor of four machine men to that of every 
living man in the Republic ; and as England has a male 
adult population of about 5,000,000, her coal places 
beside each living man a machine of twenty-man power. 

These machine-men indeed have to be built and 
nursed and served ; they eat and drink voraciously, re- 
quire sleep, and are improved by education (or inven- 
tion); must be well housed and carefully and expensively 
dressed ; demand the services of menials and a police ; 
even produce offspring. But these are in mature 
power from the moment of their birth ; and the larger 
and mightier the machine the less service in proportion 
it requires. It indulges in no expensive amusements, 
never strikes for higher wages, has no blue Mondays, 
is always at its post, and always obedient to the touch 
of the commanding hand — a conscientious, punctilious, 
loving slave, like Ariel waiting on Prospero. 

The population of the world may therefore be said to 
be changing. A new race of anthropoid machines has 

* See general estimate in Geol. Penn., 1858, p. 1017. 



Xin.] THE PHYSICAL DESTINY OF THE RACE. 339 

come into existence ; and its rate of increase is so rapid, 
and so little subservient to any known Malthusian law, 
that a prophecy may be ventured : viz., that in one or 
two centuries from this, while the human race will 
remain substantially and as a whole about as numer- 
ous as it is now, the man-power (steam-engine) popula- 
tion of the world will exceed it ten to one. And per- 
haps the greatest of all the problems of the future is: 
who will own control of this man-power ? how will its 
distribution be effected ? how far will it supplant rather 
than supplement the work of living men? and, above 
all, what will be the consequent increase of human idle- 
ness on the one hand and of human luxury on the 
other? For it is evident, that, could coal-power be 
equally distributed to all homes, a man's necessary day 
labor could easily be reduced from ten hours to one. 
But it is equally evident that steam manufacture will 
always concentrate itself on spots of the earth's surface, 
leaving a large majority of the human race indifferent 
spectators of its effects. 

Another important feature of the case must be re- 
garded. Apart from the first and current expenses of 
mining and machinery, the theoretical power in coal is 
never obtained ; not one tenth of it ; the rest is wasted 
in transmission, through boiler plate and boiling water, 
crank, cog and strap. Part of the future of civilization 
is to be determined by the gradual elevation of the per- 
centage of power left available. 

But even with the small available percentage of coal- 
power remaining unchanged, the rapidly increasing 
annual production of coal mines, and the steadily 
rising rate of increment, the accumulation of work-power 
at the disposal of working man towers before the philo- 
sophic imagination like mountain masses before the eye 
of a traveller from the plains. 

No possible discoveries of new motive powers can 
prevent the perpetual use of coal, any more than the 
discovery of steam power has caused the use of the 
horse to be forgotten. Wood will always be burnt; 
coal will always feed steam-engines and gas-holders, 
whether electric motors and galvanic lights be success- 



340 THE PHYSICAL DESTINY OE THE RAGE. [LECT. 

ful inventions or not ; and the same a thousand years 
hence as now. 

Iron too can never be deposed from its royal throne 
among the metals. Nothing can replace it. Its produc- 
tion will always be on the increase. Its applications 
will be ever and ever more numerous, various and apt. 
To the lake-dwellers of Switzerland it was more pre- 
cious than gold or bronze, for fine threads of it are in- 
laid as ornamentation on sword handles preserved in 
the museum at Berne. The Roman soldiers conquered 
Gaul merely because their sword-blades being of iron 
would not bend; they killed their opponents while 
these were stopping in the thick of the fight to re- 
straighten their bronze swords across their knees. The 
followers of Odin settled Europe and enslaved the 
stone-age populations by virtue of the iron they brought 
with them from the land of the Chalibes. Iron made 
the conquests and colonies of Spain and Holland, 
France and England possible in both hemispheres. 
Iron alone makes universal international communica- 
tion possible. Whether it require two centuries or ten, 
the globe is forging for itself as complete a shirt of 
chain mail to cover itself from head to foot withal as 
ever Knight Templar wore. The meshes become ever 
finer and closer. The tissue spreads further and fur- 
ther, from district to district, from province to province, 
from empire to empire. No desert will remain exempt 
from the iron network. Each mountain vale will re- 
ceive in time its proper branch-line. Every mountain 
spur that hinders travel will be pierced. The bridge 
has become iron ; the station-house iron ; the tele- 
graph post will be iron ; the locomotive is iron ; the 
freight car is of iron in whole or in part; the ship 
becomes iron and Elisha's axe-head floats. 

In prehistoric days iron was more costly than gold, 
because made by hand in a hole in the ground. It is so 
made by African savages and Hindu blacksmiths yet. 
In Roman days, the forge was planted at the head of a 
ravine and the blast was made by the wind hurtling up 
the gorge. In the middle ages the mountain stream 
was diverted so as to fall through a vertical wooden 



XIII.] THE PHYSICAL DESTINY OF THE RACE. 341 

pipe, and with the moist air thus driven downward and 
led off sidewise the Catalan forge was blown. Then 
the German high oven was invented, and east iron was 
bestowed as a divine boon to the race, inaugurating the 
real age of iron. Higher and higher rose the furnace 
stack until it towered 120 feet into the air, with coked 
coal for its fuel, Scottish blaokband and Yorkshire iron 
stone for its burden, and air heated to 1000° Fahrenheit 
forced into the tuyere holes under a pressure of 16 lbs. 
to the inch from twin blowing engines costing $100,000 
to construct. 

The production of cast iron in the United States in 
1880 reached 4,295,414 net tons, (40 per cent, more than 
in 1879, the year of largest production) made by 446 
furnaces in blast out of 701 in existence. 

In 1839, the first casting of anthracite pig iron was 
made, and in 1881 its amount reached 1,807,651 tons; 
1,950,205 tons were smelted with bituminous coal and 
coke; and 537,558 tons with charcoal. Of ppiegeleisen 
20,000 tons were made for the Bessemer works. 

The mere surplus exports of iron and steel from the 
British works amounted in 1879 to 2,610,000, and in 
1880 to 3,560,000 tons. 

Bessemer iron was first successfully and regularly 
made, in 1861, by Mr. Brown at St. Seurin, a few 
leagues north of Bordeaux. In 1863 the new process 
was established in Sweden, while the great inventor 
was still struggling to perfect it at Sheffield, and it had 
been tried and abandoned at Liege, at Creuzot, along 
the Rive de Gier and at Allier. In 1863 Peter Turnei* 
made his first blast at Leoben. In 1872, 120,000 tons 
of Bessemer iron were made in the United States, and 
1,203.173 in 1880. In 1872, 94,070 tons of steel rails 
were rolled in the Bessemer works of the United 
States ; in 1880, 917,592 tons. (See page 354.) 

In twenty years, all the main railway lines of Amer- 
ica have been relaid with Bessemer low steel rails made 
at Troy, at Bethlehem, Harrisburg, Johnstown, Pitts- 
burg, Cleveland, Chicago and St. Louis; and in Europe 
mammoth cannon and the plates of iron clads, the axles 
and tires of railway roUing stock, and a thousand other 



342 THE ph:ysio.4ll destiny of the race. [lect. 

shapes are produced of this new form of iron, the cost 
of which at first was $160 a ton and is now $40. 

This wonderful revolution in the manufacture of 
malleable iron for cast iron has not however set aside 
the puddling and boiling furnaces ; strange to say, it 
has not destroyed the charcoal high stack furnace. 
But it pours an incalculably larger flood of ingot iron 
upon the markets of the world, and has multiplied and 
enlarged the rolling-mills, while stimulating the devel- 
opment of iron mines, and spurring the exploitation of 
coal to its upmost speed. 

Considering now that iron ore is the most plentiful 
of all minerals except coal, and absolutely ubiquitous 
in the earth's crust, what prospects stretch before us in 
the future whichever wa}^ we look ! On iron all true 
civilization depends for its material power of work; 
and henceforth iron can be produced without stint or 
limit in all lands, by all nations. Surely the greatest 
chapter of Man's Destiny as a worker has been opened 
for our reading. 

With Bessemer iron all the rivers of earth will be 
spanned ; all public edifices will be made fireproof with 
iron beams and concrete floors ; archives will be safe ; 
museums and libraries, hospitals and asjdums, ware- 
houses and their wharves will become permanent; 
cities will be supplied with water, gas and condensed 
air for motive service ; and telegraph and telephone 
wires will be protected in iron pipes and culverts. 
Already the oil fields of Pennsylvania are netted with 
thousands of miles of iron tubing for the transporta- 
tion of petroleum, and pipe lines traverse hill and val- 
ley to bring the precious fluid to the cities on the sea- 
shore. What more iron is to do for man who can pre- 
dict? But this is certain, that the modern methods of 
producing this metal at a low cost and in infinite 
abundance will expand the capacities of all the arts 
and extend the tools and symbols of civilization to the 
remotest provinces of the world. 

But, although Coal and Iron are the Alpha and 
Omega of all the future, the rest of the mineral alpha- 
bet, the metals and bases and salts, will play their parts 



XIII.] THE PHYSICAL DESTHNrZ OF THE EACE. 343 

and sliare in the enlargement of human activity. For 
every ore chemistry is providing better processes of 
treatment, cheapening cost and enhancing quantity ; 
diminishing waste and suggesting new uses. Many 
another Stassfurt will be discovered ; and when Green- 
land has ceased to furnish its criolyte, the alkalis will 
be obtained in still greater quantities from other earths 
in many lands. 

It is said that the total value of finger rings worn by 
the people of the United States amounts to $50,000,000. 
Luxury and pleasure must increase with every other 
quality of civilized life. Jewels will be sought for, 
even when banks and saving institutions have set aside 
their chief use — that of an easy and safe investment in 
times of bad government and in places of personal 
danger. Nothing that man has once esteemed will 
man ever abandon ; and the destiny of the human 
race as a whole is what only the destiny of a few has 
in past times been : for every human being to make 
himself pleasing in his own sight. 

The Creological future of man's destiny is not confined 
to what the races will suffer or enjoy by geological 
changes in the face of the earth ; but will chiefly con- 
sist of man's discoveries in the underground and the 
uses thereof. 

Upon the great blank canvas of profound ignorance 
lasting thousands of years, the few first bold strokes of 
the coming picture arrest the eye and excite the liveli- 
est admiration. 

Toward the close of the last century, a few thinkers 
began to see that the globe was an organic being and 
had grown. In the early part of the present century, 
an examination of its skin was timidly attempted here 
and there. Less than fifty years ago, the States of 
Europe and many of the United States of America 
commenced extensive geological surveys, based upon 
geodetic meridian line- and coast-surveys; directly in 
the interest of land ownership and commerce, but in- 
directly stimulating to all departments of physical 
science. 



344 THE PHYSICAL DESTINY OF THE KACE. [LECT. 

Once embarked on this voyage of discovery, there 
was no return to port. Once established, this cam- 
paign against the closed fortresses of Nature, a large 
corps must be well armed, provisioned and transported. 
Hence the erection of one observatory after another, 
one laboratory after another, one museum after another, 
each equipped with more and more powerful and accu- 
rate apparatus. Apparatus reacted on observers, and 
observers on apparatus, constantly improving and mul- 
tiplying each other. Every day now beholds the inven- 
tion of some finer method or piece of machinery, like 
Langley's photometric balance by which, at last, the 
radiant heat of the moon is really proved and really 
measured.* 

The early work of the British, French, Swiss, Belgian, 
German, Russian and American surveys was of the 
nature of a systematic reconnoissance. In the course of 
the next twenty years enough became known to allow 
of the subdivision of continental areas into provinces 
and districts. Renewals and reorganizations of surveys 
which had been stopped took place. Schools of mines 
became numerous, and geology with its adjunct sciences 
educated for its work a multitude of young and fresh 
minds. The mere publication of work done became 
a world of literature in itself. Improvements in litho- 
graphy and photography multiplied maps, sections, and 
plates of fossil forms indefinitely. The new science of 
microscopic rock-analysis was added to geological chem- 
istry, and the employment of chemists in the labora- 
tories of Bessemer iron-works doubled the number of 
investigators and quadrupled the amount of geologi- 
cal survey work. 

Meanwhile the new applications of steam to industry 
and commerce made vast demands on geology, first for 
coal and then for iron ; and government surveys became 
insignificant in comparison with the restless and ubiqui- 
tous activity of an army of experts employed by incorpo- 
rated companies of private individuals. The knowledge 

* First announcement of this substitute for Melloni's pile, Am. 
Jour. S. & A., March, 1881. 



XIII.] THE PHYSICAL DESTINY OP THE RACE. 345 

thus obtained did not at first become the property of 
the world ; only its fruits showed. But knowers were 
multiplied and drilled ; and these, naturally desirous of 
public credit for the work they did, began to publish 
first their crude and afterwards their maturer memoirs 
under the auspices of a multitude of new Ij^ceums, so- 
cieties and associations which they had combined to 
oi'ganize, being themselves excluded from the venerable 
societies of science because as yet unknown. From 
these now well-known new geologists, mineralogists, 
metallurgists, chemists, physicists, botanists and zoolo- 
gists, the old societies have been recruiting their ranks, 
thinned by death, and infusing thus into their old veins 
new blood. 

The accidental discovery of great reservoirs of petro- 
leum, the accidental discovery of vast quantities of gold 
in the California gravels, the accidental discovery of a 
multitude of rich silver veins in Colorado — three dis- 
coveries following each other at short intervals of time 
— while they introduced the greatest possible changes 
in the movements of emigrant mankind, and caused 
the founding of new States, the building of great 
cities, the conversion of Australasia into an English- 
speaking Christendom, tlie settlement of South Africa, 
the readjustment of the values of all articles of trade, 
food included, and a new renaissance of fine art — ex- 
erted another and more lasting influence upon science 
in converting whole populations of handworkers into 
wide-awake observers, investigators, scholars and teach- 
ers of each other, collectors of all that is curious, and 
energetic explorers of every omitted, overlooked acces- 
sible or inaccessible nook and cranny of the surface of 
the earth. 

Out of this new class of mankind, numbered already 
by the hundred thousand, come inventors without end ; 
and among all their inventions the Diamond Drill is for 
geology the most important ; and is certainly destined 
to inaugurate the future study of the as yet untouched 
profo under depths of the underworld; to limit for us 
the real areas of the coal measures ; to discover beneath 
destitute regions an underground plenty of iron ; to 



346 THE PHYSICAL DESTINY OF THE KACE. [LECT. 

settle for us the problem of internal heat ; and per- 
haps to detect for us the cause while measuring the 
direction, the amount and the rate of crust move- 
ments. 

To imagine what the geological destiny of man is 
sure to be a century hence, it is only necessary to com- 
pare the mining industries of the Roman world with 
ours. 

What was the stowing of a dozen tons of the pre- 
cious metals on a trireme at Cadiz for a month's hard 
sailing and rowing to Ostium, compared to the lading 
of a million tons of anthracite on Reading railway 
steam barges at the Richmond yard in Philadelphia, 
for a two or three days' run to New York, Boston or 
Norfolk? What was the packing of amber, bronze 
swords, gold torques, amulets, gems and a few small 
iron-blooms along the Appian and Flaminian Ways, 
compared to the roar of two hundred freight trains 
per day, carrying 100,000 tons of ores and coals, iron 
tools, furniture, dry goods, grain, cattle, groceries, fruit, 
books and newspapers, in two weeks across the Amer- 
ican continent. 

Or, take the rate of increase of our length of rail- 
way lines, of the number of mines of all kinds, and of 
the expansion of smelting works and finishing mills 
and factories for the last 20 years, and project that 
rate forward for a single century ; then, calculate the 
amount of exploration and exploitation to which all 
that must give rise — the geographical, topographical 
and geological surveying, ever on the increase ; the 
penetration of vast stagnant populations by these irre- 
sistible impulses to knowledge and industry ; and the 
merging of such populations in wide-awake, laborious, 
curious, inventive, efficient, affluent Christendom, broad- 
ening the* arena, multiplying the games and enhancing 
the prizes ; — what a world it will be ! 

Then will the Diamond Drills revel in the deep. 
Governments will pay the price for profound research. 
Instead of single holes, pairs will go down, by which 
the structural sections can be made. Rows of bore- 
holes will be drilled across an entire kingdom. Not 



XUI.] THE PHYSICAL DESTINY OF THE RACE. 347 

a stratum will be missed. Usually shallow, they will 
at intervals be sunk to great depths, to test underly- 
ing old topographical surfaces. Here and there a 
single one will be put down 2,000 or 3,000 metres, 
even if it cost a fortune and the work should last 
for many years. 

Such will be the geological spirit of the coming age. 

A recent book, entitled " The Ground of the City of 
Berlin," by Herr Lossen, published at the cost of the 
municipality, gives, as the result of 316 borings in and 
around the citj^, the most precise description yet at- 
tempted of the nature, order and extent of the vari- 
ous strata composing the Diluvium of North Germany; 
and the depths and values of the various water-bearing 
planes to which wells must be sunk, or holes bored, for 
public or private use.* 

Every city of the future will execute such a work for 
itself; and not for itself alone, but for an entire province. 

The future career of Natural History, and the influ- 
ence of its two branch-ssciences Botany and Zoology — 
recent and fossil botany — recent and fossil zoology — 
upon the future welfare of the human race, can be 
easily signalized. 

The task before these sciences in the future is two- 
fold:— 

1. To continue and complete the catalogue of livmg 
species, — to obtain a perfect knowledge of the habits 
and habitats of each, — to compare them in various 
regions, — to make out their migrations, — to estimate 
the value of physical influences tending to change 
their forms, or modify their organs, — and to discover 
such passages from one variety, species or genus over 
into another: — 

2. To continue and complete (if it be not possible ever 
to exhaust) the catalogue of fossil forms, — to obtain 
the whole range of mere varieties in each species, — to 
eliminate from each genus all species which by passing 

* See Schriften Phys. OEcon. Gess., Konigsburg, 1879, Sitziing, 
p. 46. 



348 THE PHYSICAL DESTINY OP THE RACE. [LEOT. 

insensiblj'" into other closely allied species cease to be 
distinctive species, — to fill up the gaps between genera, 
— to multiply indefinitely the number of synthetic 
types, — to correlate and weave in together extinct and 
recent faunas and floras, by which lacunae in the one 
set are supplied from the other, — to establish the true 
order of probable evolutions of types and their eleva- 
tions and degradations, — to search for fossil representa- 
tions or indications of the structure of organs, and to 
connect these plausibly or by necessary logical infer- 
ence with their several circumstances of climate, food 
and warfare. 

The machinery for this study can hardly be very dif- 
ferent from that in use, since the microscope has been 
brought to its present perfection and deep sea dredg- 
ing and trawling has become a familiar art. Again, 
the question of the past and present has been one of 
quality ; that of the future will be one of quantity. 
The reconnoissance has been made; the detailed survey 
will go on for a thousand years. 

But the practical side of Natural History presents 
itself with a grand aspect. 

Formerly man dwelt in the forest, and among the 
beasts, as a hostile intruder, or as a barely tolerated 
guest. 

In course of ages man formed alliances with some of 
the animals and some of the plants, and grew powerful 
enough to wage successful warfare against the forest 
and its denizens. 

In modern days, man has established his government 
over all living things ; replants the forest which he has 
cut down ; cultivates poisonous herbs for medicine or 
pleasure ; preserves wild beasts for the exercise and dis- 
cipline of his own mental and corporeal faculties ; and 
feeds the most useless, noxious and savage creatures, 
merely to sate a vulgar curiosity, or to advance the 
refinement of science. 

In future ages, the animal and vegetable worlds will 
pay him back a rich reward for what he now does heed- 
lessly, wantonly, or scientifically alike. From the cost 
of human life in experimental cooking, in the hunt of 



XIII.] THE PHYSICAL DESTINY OF THE RACE. 349 

lions and bears on land and of whales and sharks 
at sea, in the exploration of arctic snows and tropical 
deserts to fill the museums of Christendom — from the 
outlay in Botanical and Zoological Gardens, experi- 
mental farms and parks of acclimation, government 
seed distributions and fish commissions — the first divi- 
dend of a mighty income has already been received. 
No investment the human race ever made will satisfy it 
better in a business point of view. 

Hitherto the spontaneous exercise of the creative en- 
ergy inherent in the planet sufficed to distribute and 
arrange its animate inhabitants, man included. The 
destiny of man is that of the heir to an aged monarch 
who gladly abdicates the throne. Mankind will rear- 
range its own residence first, and then regulate the sub- 
ordinate place and mode of life for every tree that 
waves, every seed that falls, every beast of the field and 
fowl of the air, and even for those lawless vagrants of 
the pathless sea on whom nature seems to have be- 
stowed a charter of absolute independence. 

The effects of man's improved civilization upon the 
cereals and tubers must always be limited by the num- 
ber of arable acres circumscribed by mountain-ranges 
and the sea-coasts, over which human wit and will 
have no control. But within these limits chemical 
geology will assign the proper planting for the proper 
soil ; and scientific agriculture will assign the minimum 
of right enrichment of the soil for producing the maxi- 
mum of food for men and cattle. 

Scientific arboriculture will not only weed out the 
useless woods and multiply the useful,; replace the 
waste of present forests, and repress wanton destruc- 
tion; but will protect exposed hill-sides from undue 
erosion, and the inhabitants of valleys from ruinous 
debacles ; while it will provide desert belts of country 
with rain evaporated from stored-up snow and artificial 
lakes. The irrigation of the globe will employ all the 
resources of engineering science, when these shall have 
been once set free from the miscalled industries of war ; 
and food will pay for growing, when all the natural 
avenues of water transportation have been rectified, 



350 THE PHYSICAL DESTINY OF THE RACE. [LECT. 

and rendered at all seasons both copious and safe, bj 
retaining reservoirs in the forest, and by jetties and 
dredged channel ways along their open courses through 
the plains. 

The breeding of cattle for labor and for food, the 
selection of poultry, the use of counter parasites for 
parasitic pests, the acclimation of varieties from other 
climes, but above all the government of fish-breeding, 
on the grandest scale, for inland lakes, for rivers and 
for soundings on the coasts — all these operations, 
already successfully begun, will become the work of 
the whole world, and increase the supply of food, and 
the wholesome occupation of the millions, beyond our 
present powers of computation. 

If any one supposes that a thousand years will be 
enough to finish all this, he has only to regard a globe 
and note these facts: — 1. That human population is 
concentrated on a few limited areas; — 2. That the 
communications between food and hunger have not 
yet been completed; — 3. That the entire continent of 
South America is still virtually uninhabited by man, 
and that great regions of North America are also to be 
occupied; — and 4. That the work of mutual destruc- 
tion has not yet ceased over the whole continent of 
Africa and a large part of Asia. For the first thou- 
sand years, civilization will be occupied in securing 
itself on one-half the land, and preparing its ways and 
means by water for afterwards repressing the disorder 
of the other half, preparatory to its reorganization on 
the basis of a beneficent commerce and a permanent 
peace. 

The discovery of the potato, of tobacco and of caout- 
chouc are the most notable in modern times bearing 
upon the conditions of life. The commerce in Ameri- 
can grain and cattle and of preserved vegetables bids 
fair to dispel future famines. But the transport of 
grain has always been a marked feature of civilization. 
The difference now is that man no longer migrates 
towards food — food comes to him from afar. This 
will do much for rendering populations stable. 

The destruction of the American forests in certain 



Xlir.] THE PHYSICAL DESTINY OF THE RACE. 351 

districts is something enormous. For example : the 
president of the Chicago Lumber Exchange reported 
March 7, 1881, that the receipts of lumber at Chicago 
during 1880 amounted to 1,564,000,000 feet, and pre- 
dicted the final exhaustion of the pine forests of the 
country in twenty years. White pine will then become 
extinct. The waste of pine wood in Pennsylvania has 
been scandalous. The best trees only were taken to 
market, and it is reckoned that not more than one-tenth 
of the actually standing pine forest was utilized; the 
rest being lost for the use of man. Had the Common- 
wealth watched over this precious treasure committed 
to its care, not only might much of this reckless 
destruction have been avoided, but if a law had been 
enforced to the effect that for every pine tree felled two 
young trees should be planted, future generations 
would enjoy a natural right of which this generation 
has deprived them. 

The forestry regulations of the Old "World must in 
course of time come into vogue in the New, and indi- 
viduals must be taught obedience to the rules of public 
interest, and compelled to recognize not only the rights 
of existing society, but the welfare of future generations. 

The United States laws of 1873-74, giving 160 acres 
of government land free to persons pledging themselves 
to plant trees, failed in operation owing to the imprac- 
ticable conditions imposed upon the planter. Public 
sentiment secured their general evasion. Railway com- 
panies have begun to plant trees along their lines, and 
farmers of the West, pressed by private necessity and 
far from coal, are planting largely. In Wales, whole 
mountain-sides have been made nurseries of the Norway 
larch. There are now Schools of Forestry established 
in France, Germany, Austria, Russia, Sweden, Switzer- 
land, Italy and Portugal, in which arboriculture is 
made a science, as well as an art, and governments 
offer large inducements to the people to plant waste 
lands. The German Government not only plants all 
roads, but buys up all private lands unfit for agricult- 
ure or pasturage to establish forests on them. 

The people of the United States will in time learn 



352 THE PHYSICAL DESTINY OF THE RACE. [LECT. 

the lesson of their old charcoal iron-smelters, that it 
only requires 20 years to rear trees fit to cut ; that a 
careful trimming and regular succession of cutting 
grounds will secure even from an ordinary farm suffi- 
cient fencing and building stuff, and fuel, from genera- 
tion to generation; and that species may be brought 
from other places which will flourish better, grow faster 
and meet the local necessities more exactly than the 
growth which stands before them. 

The destiny of the forest is to disappear before the 
axe of the pioneer settlers of all the wild regions of the 
earth. The destiny of the prairie, the pampa, the 
steppe and the savanna is to receive a cunningly se- 
lected forest from the hand of man. This process of 
equalization in field and forest will imitate the proc- 
esses of Nature, by which the mountains are being 
lowered, and the lowlands raised, all over the world, 
through the agency of countless myriads of rivulets. 
In the end, the whole earth must resemble a fair garden, 
and a fertile farm ; the very desert, condemned geologi- 
cally to eternal sterility, being destined to its own 
special kind and degree of amelioration. 

Physiology^ Anatomy and Medicine as sciences, pure 
or applied, regard man as one of the animal races; 
but it has already appeared that their final conclusions 
cannot be reached by confining their researches to the 
human frame. The health or sickness of man is now 
studied in close connection with that of other creatures ; 
and this comparison will be an endless occupation of 
the human intellect until comparative zoology itself 
becomes exhausted. In this field also experimentation 
and observation supplement, stimulate and check each 
other. The age of empiricism has not closed; nor 
should it close until every possible trial on man's con- 
stitution of every vegetable and mineral reagent shall 
have been thoroughly made and intelligently recorded 
and compared. 

But medicine is fast resolving itself into hygiene; 
and the destiny of man is to free itself as completely 
from medical as from all other kinds of superstition. 



Xni.] THE PHYSICAL DESTINY OF THE RACE. 353 

Air, water, food, sleep, work, pleasure and cleanliness 
are destined to resume the pharmacopoeia of the future. 

In this the gain will be again one of quantity, not 
quality. No man of future ages will grow taller or 
stronger, or have a sounder brain or liver, than thou- 
sands in every generation have already had- The con- 
stant weight of the earth on which man lives determines, 
once and for all, the mean weight of male men at 150 
lbs. and the mean weight of females at 120. There is 
no changing that, whether there be a millennium in 
view or not. And within the scope of just so much 
condensed hydrocarbon-compounds, and no more, must 
be located all the bodily organs, none of which can be 
spared, nor their number, quality nor functions increased 
or improved. Man as man, is already and always has 
been an absolutely perfect creature. His destiny is to 
continue to be the same perfect creature as he always 
has been. 

But man the individual, and woman the individual, 
realize the perfection of their design only when their 
individual lots are cast in pleasant places and under 
circumstances favorable for enjoying their goodly heri- 
tage. What we are to expect from the physical sci- 
ences is to instruct ever-increasing numbers of human 
beings in hygiene: — how to marry suitably; how to 
breed safely ; how to eradicate hereditary taints of 
blood from their offspring in infancy ; how to give their 
organization free play to perfect itself; how to guard 
their adolescence from depravity ; how to feed and 
clothe themselves in all stages of their mortal career ; 
how to reform the maimed and restore the debili- 
tated; how to regulate work and recreate vigor by 
sleep and amusement; how to drain and ventilate 
the dwelling-place, and how to provide comforts for 
old age. 

In a word the Destiny of Mankind is to realize by 
the thousand and by the million, more and more as 
time rolls on, an actual approximation to the perfect 
standard of healthy activity exhibited hitherto by sin- 
gle individuals, isolated communities or favored classes. 



354 



THE PHYSICAL DESTINY OP THE RACE. 



Note to page 341. The statistics of the English iron trade are 
like the hands upon a clock to the thoughtful student of human 
economics. 

The latest stroke of the bell rings out thus, from the annual 
report of the British Iron Trade Association. The following 
table shows the distribution of the pig-iron production of the Uni- 
ted Kingdom in 1871, and that in 1880. That which will arrest 
the reader's eye, will be the enormous increase of pig-metal con- 
sumed now in making Bessemer and Siemens steel : — 



In 1871. 

Pig-iron, total made, 5,667,179 tons. 

Converted into wrought iron, 2,486,000 

" " Bessemer steel, .... 220,000 

" " Siemens steel 35,000 

" " tin-plate iron, ..... 120,000 

Applied to foundry purposes, etc., . . . 1,748,721 

Surplus, exported 1,057,458 

Total. 11,334,358 



In 1880. 

7,741,000 ton$. 
1,950,000 
1,220,000 

295,000 

265,000 
2,379,371 
1,631,629 



15,482,000 



LECTURE XIV. 

THE SOCIAL DESTINY OF THE EACE. 

History is the poor, imperfect, distorted, mistaken 
record of man's past destiny. 

The science of History is a partially successful res- 
toration of the old portrait of the human race, with 
new paints, under consultation with its best friends. 

Can any task be more hopeless? Oh, it is not at all 
hopeless. What are the monuments of antiquity but 
faded photographs? What are buried statues and 
steles, buried urns, arms and tools, but family records? 
What are dead languages but fossiliferous strata in 
which lie safely preserved for our examination millions 
of words and grammatical inflections each of which re- 
stores to us some mental conception of our ancestors ? 

The analogy of the present will explain the past. 
The papyrus of Turin is in a much more sadly dam- 
aged condition than is the book of human history. 

To collect all the mutilated leaves of this book and 
to decipher all the lines of writing on them — this is 
part of the future destiny of man. 

The revival of enthusiasm for the study of Antiquity 
and its antiquities in the midst of a most practical and 
prosy business world, and in the face of a whirlwind of 
physical science, is an amazing phenomenon. Never 
did human beings seem more wholly engrossed in the 
present ; yet never were there so many nor such zeal- 
ous antiquarians. The rush forward is unprecedented, 
universal, irresistible ; yet some thousands of thinkers 
stand with their backs to the future and their faces to 
the past, letting the crowd sweep past them. The out- 



356 THE SOCIAL DESTINY OF THE E,ACE. [LECT. 

put of coal and iron is parodied by the output of arrow- 
heads, coins, papyri, torsos and skeletons. Troys upon 
Troys are stoped at the archeeological mine of Hissar- 
lik. Mycense is searched for the armor of Agamemnon. 
The excavations at Olympia are feeding the Museum at 
Berlin. Apollo's shrine is found spanning a chasm on 
the peak of Delos. 

Men are now living who have witnessed not only 
the institution of free government, the invention of 
steam, and the spread of the telegraph, but the re- 
covery of the lost languages of Egypt and Assyria, the 
uncovering of Nineveh and Zoan, the publication of 
the ancient inscriptions of India, the translation of the 
Veds, the collation of the folks-lore of a multitude of 
nationalities, and the establishment of the Philosophy 
of History on a permanent critical and scientific basis. 
Every university has its chairs of ancient learning from 
which the copious restorations of past human life are 
explained to eager students preparing themselves for 
fresh expeditions and explorations at the very scenes 
of old events. Historical, Antiquarian, Numismatic, 
Archaeological, Anthropological, Oriental societies are 
springing into active life, not only in the national capi- 
tals, but in the smaller cities and towns of all coun- 
tries. Peripatetic congresses of antiquarians assemble 
at some different centre of observation each successive 
year, and appoint committees to investigate the most 
promising localities of the neighborhood. The Roman 
army-itineraries are studied for the purpose of recover- 
ing prsetorian stations, which may be searched for tes- 
serae, carrying trade-marks, to elucidate ancient manu- 
factures and lines of commerce, or consular names and 
dates to rectify chronology. 

A topographical survey of Palestine is accomplished 
by the English Church in obedience to the new scien- 
tific sentiment of its Deans and Bishops. The Sheriff 
of Islam grants a hateef to the agents of the British 
Museum to violate the graveyards of Kuyunyik for the 
purpose of discovering in the palace-library of Assur- 
banipal the Babylonian original of the Hebrew story of 
the flood. 



XIV.] THE SOCIAL DESTINY OF THE EACB. 357 

And where and when will all this end ? Is there a 
natural term to the awakened curiosity of man regard- 
ing his origin, his career and his destiny? Can any 
limit be set to the wealth of monumental lore concealed 
beneath the soil of plains which have been cultivated 
for three thousand years since money was first coined 
and buried on the approach of the invader, whose 
departure left a track of smoking ruins behind him, or 
at the commencement of a commercial journey from 
which the merchant never returned ? 

Rome has been burnt to the ground seventeen times. 
Every time its houses fell they made a layer of tools 
and furniture, armory and statuary, amphorae and 
lamps, jewels, coins and tablets, to be rediscovered by 
modern builders of high houses with deep founda- 
tions, by street contractors driving new culverts, and 
by the Accademia dei Lincei with its sharp eyes and 
pricked-up ears. Every now and then a subterranean 
church of St. Clemens, or a Marmorium, is revealed; 
and all the world takes railroad or steamboat to see and 
admire it. Sometimes even in London and Paris a 
temple to Jupiter or a bath-house of Julian is dis- 
covered.* 

Surely as the number of antiquarians increases and a 
Chinese sentiment of ancestral veneration pervades the 
west, the rage of discovery will only burn the fiercer, 
and the right knowledge of the past history of man- 
kind will frame itself the faster. Upon the past as a 
high place of vision the prophet of the future sets his 
chair and writes his oracles. 

This antiquarian lore is looked upon of course by the 
uninitiated as a child's play, or a fool's errand. But 
in the laboratory of human thought it is proving itself 
to be the aqua regia of reason, the universal solvent of 
popular delusions, by which the education of nations 
will be purified and fixed. Criticism needs precedent 
facts. Without these, criticism is the mere caprice of 
fancy or the prejudice of ignorance. Informed by a 
sufficiency of proven data, criticism is the right govern- 

* The table plate of Valens has been lately found on the field of 
Hermann's victory. 



358 THE SOCIAL DESTINY OF THE KACE. [LECT. 

ment of reason dealing with what most nearly concerns 
humanity in all ages past, present and to come. Por- 
phyry set himself with the seriousness of Kant and the 
youthful zeal of Paul to investigate the popular relig- 
ion of his day, and wrote his great work " On the Phil- 
osophy to be drawn from Oracles " which Eusebius 
quotes so largely. But his undertaking was a failure, 
both for himself and for his fellow-men, as he himself 
sadly confesses; because it was impossible, he says, to 
verify the facts which he had set himself to criticise. 
Until archaeological science had done the work it has 
done, serious men of modern times were in Porphyry's 
case. Now, enough is already known to make most of 
the popular beliefs suspected ; and the ' skilled criticism 
of past facts, conducted by men bred to thinking 
according to the rules of modern science, has already 
greatly modified those conceptions of God, the world, 
and human duty which are habitually entertained and 
acted on by modern society. 

This readjustment of the ideas of mankind must 
become more and more wide-spread and operative ; 
affecting profoundly the status of every community 
of human beings; and introducing a state of things 
throughout the whole world, a thousand or several 
thousand years hence, impossible to describe by antici- 
pation. 

One thing alone is plainly visible beforehand : the 
Mythology and Ethnology of the past will both of 
them pass out of the general human belief and mem- 
ory, and be replaced both by Christian views of the 
government of the world, and by an international 
friendship, in the mild flame of which all antipathies 
of race must be slowly consumed. 

The modern science of Mythology deals only with 
historical facts, it is true ; and is itself unimpassioned ; 
believes nothing of itself; merely collects, collates, 
classifies and accounts for the faiths which have in all 
past ages prevailed, and which still survive as prevalent 
motives of conduct with millions of men and women. 
But in doing this it has collected and will continue to 
collect and arrange data for an exalted, far-seeing. 



XIV^] THE SOCIAL DESTINY OP THE RACE. 359 

fearless, theological criticisra, the slayer of supersti- 
tions, and the herald of true religion. 

The science of Ethnology is making the same kind of 
passionless, unprejudiced, critical study of the past con- 
duct of the race, in its restless migrations backwards 
and forwards, by sea and land ; the early settlements 
and centres of dispersions; its lines of march; its inva- 
sions, extirpations, overlappings and commixtures ; its 
refuges and establishments; its more stable subdivi- 
sions, and their present arrangement; its modifica- 
tions of individual or collective forms, features, colors, 
tongues, occupations and ideas ; — in a word, a thorough 
study of the old and the new meanings of two terms : 
race and nation. 

What is as yet the outgo from all this studious learn- 
ing — no longer merely gathered from books, or by 
hearsay of uninstructed travellers, but from personal 
investigation by trained men of science, sent into every 
region for no other purpose, furnished with all possible 
facilities for a successful examination and discussion of 
facts, and subjected to the closest cross-examination at 
the seats of universal knowledge on their return ? 

It is, in the main, this : — the essential unity of the 
human race, and the striking similarity of its principles 
and methods of earthly existence. 

When it is observed that the daily press, driven and 
distributed by steam, lets nothing escape publication, 
but compels the un investigating multitude to hear the 
report of all investigation, even on subjects in which it 
feels but little interest, — when one notices the rapidly 
spreading popular taste for descriptions and pictures of 
whatever is foreign, strange or curious, — when a cal- 
culation is made of the probable increase of such litera- 
ture and of the number of its readers, — the inference 
is inevitable that a sentiment of brotherhood must be 
generated on the largest scale, and must become a 
vital source of sympathy and justice between nation 
and nation and race and race as time rolls on. 

It is needless to quote the signs of this fresh and 
most luxuriant growth of geniality and cordiality ob- 
servable in the newspaper literature of Europe and 



860 THE SOCIAL DESTINY OF THE EACE. [LECT. 

America ; in the new codes of law ; in recent diplo- 
matic intercourse; and even in the conduct of war. 
It is a great reality; it will become a still greater 
reality. It already hinders mutual wrong and destruc- 
tion. It must in time bring in an age of at least com- 
parative peace and beneficence. As it sinks deeper and 
deeper into the minds of men" and spreads from province 
to province and from nation to nation it will surely 
quench the quarrelsome instinct of humanity and realize 
the teachings of Jesus. Whatever be the fate of creeds 
determined by other causes, no creed can live in the 
future unless it drink of this water of life. However 
stubborn the barriers of language, they must all sooner 
or later open their gates to admit one element of lan- 
guage common to all: terms of universal fellowship 
and good-will, of common interest and mutual sympa- 
thy. As Comparative Mythology is destined to re- 
adjust the theology of the world, so Comparative 
Ethnology is destined to re-adjust the international 
morality of the world, on a basis of its stirpal com- 
munity of blood, and by virtue of a virtual identity 
of manners and rights, amply illustrated, and every- 
where proclaimed and understood. 

The past history of the race however will be potent 
for the production of future events; and the present 
geographical distribution of races and languages and 
religions and governments must largely determine the 
succession of changes which future historians will have 
to record. 

The first great event of the future will be the taking 
of Constantinople. Twice already it has shown itself 
to be the lock on the door of history. Twice the key 
has turned and fate passed through. When Constan- 
tine transferred to it the imperial throne, the Western 
world died under the blows of the northern barbarians. 
Taken by the Turks in 1453, it sent back life to the 
Western world ; but the Eastern world sank to its pres- 
ent condition of extreme senility, poverty and wretch- 
edness. Taken by Austria or Greece in the next cen- 
tury, as it is sure to be, when the present strain of 
European diplomacy snaps at the touch of the next 



XIV.] THE SOCIAL DESTINY OE THE RACE. 361 

general revolution, the East will renew its youth like 
the eagle, and a new-world era will begin. Europe is 
like an angry boil on the earth's skin ; it must soon 
burst ; and then it can heal ; and the fever of the sur- 
rounding world will abate, and health be established. 
As long as the mutual jealousy of European nations 
burns, the Turk and the Arab can prevent the advance 
of civilization. 

When one contemplates the site of Byzantium, one 
comprehends the jealousy of London. Here the East- 
ern and Western worlds meet. Towards this centre of 
three continental areas of infinite fertility flow the 
Rhone, the Nile, the Danube, the Dnieper and the 
Don. A wise government established here must 
absorb Austria and Greece, European Russia, Asia 
Minor, Syria, Arabia and Northern Africa, and hold in 
cheek Italy, France and Spain. But the wise govern- 
ment of the future will be just and benevolent. The 
absorption will be confederative ; the centralization 
representative ; the process peaceful and peace-assur- 
ing; the consequences — a revival of agriculture, the 
restitution of woodlands, the amelioration of desert cli- 
mates, security for trade, the expansion of commerce, 
the reformation of nationalities, and the restoration of 
the glorious Eastern World. A hundred years may 
bring, a thousand years will not be too long to wait 
for, the consummation of such events. 

Sociology is the science of Human Society, as based 
on property, its manufacture, and its transfer from 
hand to hand. 

This science wears two faces, the one historical, the 
other theoretical. 

Historical Sociology ranges with Ethnology, Mythol- 
ogy and Philology, as a critical statement of the basis, 
form and fruits of human association, in the family, in 
the clan, in the tribe, and in the nation. It states the 
facts as far as they can be learned; investigates the 
causes of these facts; and compares, contrasts, classi- 
fies and infers from them what is probable and possible. 

Theoretical Sociology on the contrary ignores in 



362 THE SOCIAL DESTnSTY OF THE EACE. [LECT. 

great measure the past procedure of the race and 
eudeavors to devise the best methods for constructing 
human society out of present materials, in present cir- 
cumstances, leaving future generations to care for their 
own associations. In this aspect only does Sociology 
expose itself to the oft-repeated and damaging charge 
of not being a science, but only a trade. 

Nothing is recognized as science which excludes 
experiment; nor can any science produce generaliza- 
tions acceptable as laws of nature if it take not cogniz- 
ance of the whole range of recorded experimentation. 
Sociologists degenerate into fanatics unless they make 
their science comparative ; studying the whole past in 
close connection with the whole present social life of 
the race. Society has been an experimental kind of 
existence from the beginning, and is so still : — experi- 
ments in manufacture, experiments in commerce and 
finance, experiments in law and government, and ex- 
periments in war. And these experiments have been 
tried so repeatedly, under such various circumstances, 
and with such long trains of serious consequences, that 
it is idle for any theorist to think himself a statesman 
unless he be well versed in the social history of ages 
gone by. For the ages gone by have begotten the age 
we live in, and the essential qualities of mankind do 
not change with the changes of surrounding things. 
New powers are offered to man for his service ; but 
man will always take advantage of enlarged facilities 
for accomplishing his same old favorite purposes. 
Through all time his main occupation will be hand- 
work; his chief aim, accumulation; his most valued 
pastime, government ; and his fiercest passion, war. 

But handwork, with or without machinery, has for 
its main object the production, employment and accu- 
mulation of property ; government is chiefly concerned, 
when once life and limb are made secure, with the 
regulation of the ownership and transfer of property ; 
and war would lose all zest were there no property to 
be seized or destroyed. 

On Property therefore Human Society has always 
been erected and maintained. As the question: What 



XIV.] THE SOCIAL DESTIKY OP THE RACE. 363 

is Property/? governs the current of events, so the ques- 
tion: What will be considered Property/ when all the 
world is civilized hy education ? must receive some defi- 
nite answer before a prophecy of Human Destiny can 
be imagined. 

The first postulate in the theological story of the 
universe is the eternal reality and value of property. 
The first assertion is that God owns the world which 
He made, and therefore can do what he likes with it. 

This theological maxim has been encased in the 
corner-stone of the foundation of every edifice of 
humane society. 

Savages and civilized agree that to create is to 
possess; whether it be a tool or a weapon, clothing 
or ornament, hut or canoe. In early times, a wife was 
captured property, a child personal property, sacred 
from all other claimants. The only limitation to this 
law of personal property sprang from an indispensable 
community of action. What could be made or got by 
the man alone was his own. What could be made 
or got only by the family as a whole, was owned in 
common by the family ; but by no other family. What 
was only attainable by the joint efforts of a tribe was 
the property of the entire tribe. Polyandry obscured 
and extinguished the individual ownership of the child; 
and then the eldest brother, as head of the house, 
became the master of the lives and fortunes of all the 
children, whether begotten by himself or by his 
brothers. The fruit of ihe chase, in which all shared, 
was partaken by all; and the fruit of the soil, which 
all tilled. Hence savage tribes still hold land in 
commonalty; and the worst feature of this mode of 
tenure, the encouragement it gives to laziness, is the 
strongest popular argument with civilized nations in 
favor of ownership in severalty. 

But this ver}'" argument for the se" eral ownership of 
the land which can be divided, and of the fountains, 
running streams and coast lines which can be defined 
for fishing and milling purposes, is of no logical value 
except so long as it stands upon the original ground 
of Use. 



364 THE SOCIAL DESTINY OF THE EACE. [LECT. 

To the savage tribe it is all-important to define and 
defend boundaries; because expatriation on the one 
hand and invasion on the other, means for them either 
annihilation or enslavement. 

For the civilized farmer, the landmark has the same 
value ; it protects work and the fruit of work ; that is, 
life and happiness. But this its main function is of 
course limited to the homestead and its vicinage ; and 
cannot be justified at a distance. To remove the land- 
marks was a crime rightly cursed by Jewish legislation. 
But the wealth and enterprise of modern days has 
caused a far removal; in important respects indeed a 
necessary one ; but in other respects most unjust and 
injurious. 

Absenteeism, a social disease of the new order of 
things, demands a wise and skilful diagnosis, a careful 
and benevolent treatment. Surely it must some day 
obtain both. But the day seems far removed; for, 
what with changes of government ; the general increase 
of population ; the expansion of trade ; the multiplica- 
tion of industries ; new inventions in the mechanic arts 
fostering the growth of cities and the immigration of 
provincials into these ; the location of continental rail- 
ways branching in all directions; the development of 
innumerable gold, silver, copper, iron, coal and oil 
regions and the transference to them of homeless multi- 
tudes ; the flow of emigration into newly discovered 
areas of the earth's surface ; and the general intermixt- 
ure of families, tribes, nations, and races, still clinging 
to their only half-abandoned claims to old possessions 
while inaugurating claims to new — Absenteeism has 
seen its opportunity and seized it with a vigorous grasp. 
It lias changed its form, and with that its name. It is 
now Mono'poly. 

Yet Monopoly is not an evil ; only subject, like other 
things, to the risk of becoming evil. In this it differs 
from Absenteeism, which is almost wholly evil. Mo- 
nopoly is the return of civilization to take up the sav- 
age code of ownership in commonalty, without purging 
that code of what is unsuitable to civilized ownership in 
severalty. Instead of, as formerly, the tribe at war 



KIV.] THE SOCIAL DESTINY OF THE RACE. 865 

with every neighboring tribe, we have now the com- 
pany in competition with every other company. In- 
stead of a contest witli bows and arrows, clubs and 
spears, ambuscades and hand-to-hand battles, we have 
log-rolling in the legislature, intrigues in the directors' 
room, sharp practice at the bar, and the bulling and 
bearing of stocks on change. 

The popular cry against Monopolies is a mistake; 
for, as the drainage of a continent requires great rivers, 
and the rains collect into lakes and seas, from the evap- 
oration of which the continents are again blessed with 
fertilizing showers, so, private wealths combine to form 
accumulated capital, by the which entire nations of 
working-men are provided with various work. And 
capital must be administered. And administration 
requires service. And service to be efficient must be 
made responsible. And the most stringent sense of 
responsibility is that of a man to his own interest. 
Power when distributed among many loses force by 
losing directness ; when placed in the hands of one or 
a few it becomes quick, straightforward and efficient. 

The monopolies of the Middle Ages, and of the Ori- 
ent of the present day, were and still are iniquitous 
compacts between tyrants and their tools, for fleecing 
the people. Farming out the taxes has reduced en- 
slaved nations to wretchedness and kept them wretched. 
The salt and grain-grinding monopolies, once in vogue, 
deserved all the execrations they received. But a gov- 
ernment monopoly of the sale of tobacco is a blessed 
mitigation of despotism. 

There remains under modern constitutional govern- 
ments only one monopoly which perpetuates the system 
of bad government now so fast passing away — the mo- 
nopoly of land by hereditary descent. 

France relieved itself of this load by the great rev- 
olution of 1789. Switzerland threw off the same load 
gradually, in her long struggles with Austria and Bur- 
gundy; but is not even yet entirely disencumbered. 
AH the other countries of Europe groan still beneath 
its weight. 

In America alone, the land, like air and water, is as 



366 THE SOCIAL DESTINY OF THE RACE. [LECT. 

yet too plentiful to be appreciably monopolized either 
by government, by privileged classes, or by individuals. 
But the spirit of land-monopoly works even in the 
United States, and produces evils here and there, petty 
in view of the woes of other times and lands, but 
prox^hetic of future danger. Bred of the old delusion 
that he who does not create can nevertheless rightfully 
own, it exerts its subtile influence upon all the legisla- 
tion of all the united states ; and nothing but the fresh 
energy of new ideas, nothing but the counteraction of a 
wise and good public sentiment, will avail to save us 
as a nation from a future destiny which shall repeat 
the horrors of the past. 

The popular sentiment in America, however, is sound 
at the core. It afQrms silently, if not openly, that 
Absenteeism is not monopoly in the modern sense, but 
monopoly in the sense of the dark ages. Americans 
permit it to live and work, but watch and limit its 
activity ; tax it heavily ; and hamstring it effectively by 
forbidding its entail. The woes of Ireland issue from 
the womb of an entailed absenteeism. The prosperity 
of France is wholly due to the various effects produced 
upon the character and habits of the people by the en- 
forced equal devisement of land to all and each of the 
surviving children. Despotism is impossible without 
an aristocracy based upon an hereditary close entail of 
land, — either an aristocracy of title, or an aristocracy 
of money, or both. The iron despotism of England — 
the least free of all civilized countries for the multi- 
tude — is upheld by the power of this prerogative of the 
peer, reinforced by the same power and prerogative 
vested in the capitalist. The Irish landlord lives in 
London ; his banker in London pays the troops which 
guard his land in Ireland. The Common Law of Eng- 
land (called "common" in a sarcastic sense) declares 
that he oivns that land in Ireland. The Irish tenants 
rebel — not against government, but against this idea. 
The whole human race — except the privileged owners 
of "real estate" and the lawyers, politicians, and sol- 
diers, their retainers — the whole human race enter- 
tains the profound conviction, implanted by Nature 



XIV.] THE SOCIAL DESTISrY OF THE RACE. 367 

and cultivated by the experience of life, that ownership 
is based on creation, and confirmed by use, alone. 

The destiny of man is to prove this conviction to be 
true, and to illustrate the truth of it in the future. 

Will it be accounted illogical, if I say that the so- 
called Monopolies of our day, at which self-styled dem- 
ocrats and socialists bay, like dogs at the moon, are 
among the first of these illustrations ? 

Let us see. 

The genius of our age is the spirit of mutual asso- 
ciation for the promotion of a common interest. It 
organizes society in a thousand ways so as to combine 
its particular individual forces for greater efficiency, 
interweaving a thousand twisted threads of wisdom 
and energy into one fabric. 

Relieved of autocracy, that vain substitution of a 
local god- and father-despot whose sceptre and sword 
should answer all demands of law, justice and benevo- 
lence, — relieved of oligarchy, that equally unsuccessful 
makeshift for a nation's self-keep and self-culture, — 
human society is now free to assume the reins of its 
own government, to provide for its own wants, to regu- 
late its own conduct, to cure its own harms, to select 
its own paths to prosperity, and to forecast its own 
destiny. 

The first stage of the new adventure is that of Con- 
sultation. Knowledge of the situation — the whole sit- 
uation, within and without, — must be gained first. 

And the first business to be attended to is the 
taking an account of stock ; estimating the resources at 
human command for accomplishing needful human 
work; debating and distinguishing between the need- 
ful and the less needful, the useful and the agreeable, 
the desirable and the attainable ; stating the amount 
and quality of raw material ; the efficiency of the 
machinery by which it -can be converted to use; the 
means of transportation; and methods of distribution, 
where the supply is demanded. And this as regards 
not only the feeding, clothing, housing, and warming of 
the body, but the enlightenment of the intellect, the 
rectification of the will, and the ennoblement of the 
heart — for each and all — also. 



368 THE SOCIAL DESTINY OF THE RACE. [LECT. 

The second business to be attended to, is the adjust- 
ment of property. Modern society is essentially dem- 
ocratic. The Divine Right has descended to all. The 
old idea of the clan, or tribe, or gens, has been expanded 
to fit the entire nation. There must be a distribution of 
work, and a distribution of the proceeds of work, to all. 
He that works much must get much ; he that works ill 
earn little. But the wages must be proportioned to 
the work. Whether the work be invisible or visible, 
skilled or merely manual, for the craving necessities or 
for the no less craving imaginations of men — the work 
in any case must be justly estimated at its true value to 
society, and be rewarded with a just amount of owner- 
ship in real estate^ — not necessarily in land, but in 
whatever is real in the estate of the owner, whoever he 
may be, working under the divine inspiration of a 
desire and a hope to own. And the same legal safe- 
guards should be thrown around " personal property " 
80 called, that are so sedulously drawn around what 
improperly arrogates to itself the exclusive title of 
" real estate." 

Consultation upon these two subjects of universal 
interest was not feasible until the commencement of 
the present century. Kings could consult upon their 
own affairs, but not the people. Even merchants and 
bankers found it difficult to consult. Armies were lost 
for want of means of verbal communication. 

The discovery of the power of steam, and the discov 
ery of the galvanic current,— • the inventions of the 
steamboat, the railroad, the newspaper and the tele- 
graph — were trumpet notes of invitation to man- 
kind to meet in convention to revise the Constitu- 
tion of the Commonwealth. Slowly but surely all 
classes of men in Christendom have answered the call. 
They are now in session. The convention has a 
quorum of millions. There is a committee on every 
subject of necessity or interest to any class of society, 
however small. They sit en permanence. They report 
at pleasure. They elect to fill their own vacancies. 
They appoint their own chairmen, secretaries, and 
treasurers ; frame their own parliamentary rules ; meet 



XIV.] THE SOCIAL DESTINY OF THE RACE. 369 

and adjourn in independence of eacli other ; have their 
several committee rooms; keep their own private and 
publish their public records. Nothing private is long 
concealed. The committees know each other's debates 
and pass judgment on each other's resolutions ; debate 
again and again and resolve accordingly. 

These committees of the general convention of civ- 
ilized communities are all well known to you, by name, 
and character. They are the Trades unions, the 
Boards of brokers, the Institutes of Mining, Civil and 
Mechanical engineers; Astronomical, Meteorological, 
Physical, Chemical, Mineralogical, Geological, Palseon- 
tological, Botanical, Zoological, Historical, Archseologi- 
cal, Philological, Statistical and Geographical socie- 
ties; the Cobden club, the Iron and Steel association, 
the Free-trade league, the Land league ; Boards of 
trade and Merchants' associations; the Society of the 
Cincinnati ; Army clubs. Literary clubs. Political clubs 
of all kinds; Scientific congresses, associations and 
unions in every land; Health conventions, Prison dis- 
cipline conventions, Political caucuses and conventions 
of every size and shade of opinion; Freemasonries 
of a dozen names ; Religious conventions by bishops, 
by presbyters, by laity of every order and doctrine ; 
Railway, Canal and Mining companies, and Bureaus of 
government, with statistical, agricultural portfolios no 
longer held by the lords but by the servants of the 
people ; no longer busy with plans for destrojdng the 
peace of the many for the sake of the ease of the few, 
but collecting and distributing the knowledge of what 
is good to all, that all may obtain some fair and reason- 
able share of it. 

This new organization of civilized society resembles 
the old organization of semi-civilized society as a man 
awakened to the exercise of brain and nerves and mus- 
cles resembles a man with the poAvers of thought and 
motion still locked fast in slumber. The organic 
nature of mankind has always manifested its ability 
for performing the functions of amity and comity on a 
small scale, in the sphere of the family and the clan, 
where intercommunication and mutual intelligence are 



370 THE SOCIAL DESTINY OF THE EACB. 

comparatively easy and simple, and within narrow geo- 
graphical limits defined by the physics of human exist- 
ence. Now, that physical disabilities are so abated 
or removed, intercommunication of neighborhoods and 
provinces with one another and of whole nations with 
one another has become swift and facile. The old bar- 
riers are thrown down ; the seas are bridged, the Alps 
are tunnelled ; lightning and news are synonymous 
terms; language alone remains forbidding; and even 
this last barrier is being removed by the resolutions 
of the World Committee on Education. International 
conventions are the order of the day. International 
expositions of the industries of all nations explain to 
the eyes and minds of all peoples their common inter- 
ests. Thousands of millions of letters and postal cards 
fly and fall like snow upon the globe, covering, warm- 
ing and moistening the soil of the coming springtime 
of history ; the seed in which is Christianity ; and the 
harvest must needs be Peace and Plenty. 

The Isis of man's destiny has dropped her veil. Lo ! 
we suspected the worn face and streaming eyes of the 
Mater Dolorosa. We behold instead the radiant coun- 
tenance, fall of wisdom, energy and benevolence, of 
the Dresden Madonna ; and in her arms sits the regal 
boy, the thoughtful, planful, powerful Horus-Christ ; 
just waked from the dreamful slumbers of a millennial 
night, to enjoy a millennial day ; the observant specta- 
tor of his Father's work. 



LECTURE XV. 

THE FUTUBE ECONOMIES OF MANKIND. 

I HAVE said that the common social life of the world 
is represented in four ways: — 1. by Manufacture, 2. 
by Trade and Commerce, 3. by Warfare, and 4. by 
Legislation. ^ 

How will the future declare itself in respect to these 
normal lines of conduct pursued by the human race, as 
it becomes more and more a unit ? Let us take them 
up in order; and with the premise that they call for 
discussions on the nature of property, on the value of 
money, and on the art of finance far too fundamental 
and extensive to be more than suggested in this lecture. 

In Manufactures the skill of man has exhausted 
itself. Evidently there are few materials left to dis- 
cover which can be so important for the arts as the 
india-rubber gum, quinine, the black diamond, the 
Stassfurt salts, cryolite, and anthracite. 

The modern house typifies the future, as plainly as 
the wigwam and mud hovel signifies the past. 

Within the domain of luxury the manufacturing 
genius shall find its chief employment in coming ages. 
Universal comfort will be the watchword; for, com- 
fort, once the expensive monopoly of a few, is to be 
the cheap abundance of the many. 

Machinery is both the cause and the effect of comfort. 
What few demand, a few supply; and the supply is 
occasional, sparing, difficult and costly. What all 
demand is sure to be created abundantly, quickly, 
easily and at a low price ; transported in quantities to 



372 THE FUTUIiE ECONOMIES OF MANKIND. [LECT. 

great distances ; and stored in j)iles for general con- 
sumption. 

No more exquisite gold work, silver work or glass 
work can ever be made than is exhumed from ancient 
tombs. But $50,000,000 worth of finger-rings are now 
worn by the people of the United States. The grand 
duchess Margaret of Burgundy slept in a small stone 
room, with one low window, in the chateau of Dijon ; 
sat upon a wooden stool ; and dressed by a hand glass 
no larger than a window-pane. A cell in the Eastern 
Penitentiary is a fine place in comparison. The audi- 
ence chamber of Queen Elizabeth of England was car- 
peted with rushes, not free from vermin; and the 
house of any mechanic in Philadelphia compared with 
her palace is a heaven of curious luxury. 

Modern machinery is fast obliterating the distinctions 
of caste and class. When Stein way's, Chickering's and 
Broadwood's grand-action pianos are heard in secluded 
farm-houses, the old days of chivalry, with spinnet and 
cither, have closed up their accounts with civilization ; 
assigning their best possessions and long jealously 
guarded rights to the canaille. No chariot of Pharaoh 
or Emperor could compete for curious elegance or util- 
ity with either the English bicycle or the American 
buggy; no coliseum with a modern opera house. 

What were the glories of Cleopatra's barge, or of the 
Bucentaur, in comparison with the splendid convenience 
of a Fall R.iver steamboat, daily fitted out for the pleas- 
ure of any two thousand citizens who please to occupy 
it? The elaborately aristocratic post-chaise system of 
only seventy years ago seems rude and awkward now, 
in view of the democratic refinements of daily trains 
of palace, sleeping, smoking, dining, express and mail 
cars following each other in rapid flight and ceaseless 
succession across the American continent. 

The application of steam to machinery, and of sci- 
ence to invention, has accomplished this ; and there- 
fore, since the power of steam is infinitely applicable, 
and since the multitude of inventors is always on the 
increase, the universal distribution of communal lux- 
uries to mankind would seem to be merely a question 
of time. 



XV.] THE FUTUKB ECONOMIES OF MANKIND. 373 

It must also be considered, that in past ages war 
was habitual, cruel, and reckless of consequences. 
Every conflict was succeeded by the sack of cities, and 
cities were the only centres of manufacture. With the 
city, its artisans also were destroyed ; and their ma- 
chinery, poor as it was, perished in the same ruin. 

Now, on the contrary, wars come rarely, rage fiercely 
but locally, destroy little, spare carefully, and, so far 
from belittling, actually enlarge and invigorate the 
sphere of the arts; and modern manufacturing estab- 
lishments, placed rather in the open country than in 
cities, escape instead of inviting destruction. 

The Finance of the future — what will it be ? 

That must depend upon the future reconstructions of 
social ideas of property. 

In past times, the task of collection and expenditure 
was simple, if not easy : collection by force, and expen- 
diture at will. Absolute power, based on the right of 
the strongest and on the loose aggregation of the mill- 
ions, took what it pleased, or could get, and spent 
upon itself and its favorites. The lord owned every- 
thing and was accountable to no one. The tax-gatherer 
compounded with the monarch for half the imposts, 
and often lost his half, now to the unscrupulous despot 
'and now to the enraged and despairing mob. 

At length the necessities of the throne established 
the right of the commons to initiate appropriations 
for its maintenance. 

Finally, democratic revolutions formulated the pre- 
scription "No taxation without representation" — so 
far as freeholders of the male sex were concerned. 

Republican government has resulted in the popular 
criticism of all appropriation bills not only after but 
previous to their passage ; and all such bills are re- 
ferred, not to the Executive, but to a standing Com- 
mittee on finance. 

It seems likely then that in the future every separate 
interest of society will have its weight in determining 
legislative financial enactments; and that a just balance 
of all interests will be represented l)y a frequently mod^ 



374 THF JPUTUEE ECONOMIES OF MANKEsTD. [LECT. 

fied but generally consistent system of internal taxes 
and foreign imposts, lightening the burden of expense 
for each by equally distributing it over all. 

But a struggle will always be maintained between 
the direct and indirect methods. 

Before social interests became so involved with odc 
another as they are now, and when individuals and 
guilds and single communities maintained a strict and 
jealous individuality, having little intercourse with one 
another, each standing squarely face to face with the 
ruling power, the personal property tax was the sim- 
plest, quickest and most forcible method of taxation. 
So, the purist still admires the income tax for its 
directness and simplicity. But business men univer- 
sally prefer an impost on the' fruits of industry; 
because that method of taxation raises no embarrass- 
ing personal questions. Moreover, losses which are 
not noticed are not grieved over; and poor people, 
receiving no tax-bills, suppose that capitalists and land- 
lords alone support the government, and are seldom 
roused to inquiry except at crises when house ex- 
penses exceed wages. Even then, far from compre- 
hending that both prices and wages are regulated 
partly by taxation and partly by the balance of 
supply and demand — they lay the blame vaguely 
upon capital in the abstract, and not upon any pre- 
cise misappropriation of capital for unnecessary or 
wasteful objects. 

Even should a universal better education of the mul- 
titude hereafter avail to clear men's vision for a real 
understanding of the complicated finances of human 
life — which is very doubtful — the hope of the future 
must rest upon a breed of honest experts, whom the 
people can trust, and to whom they can delegate the 
power to tax. The education of such a class of experts 
may perhaps be hoped for ; but it will manifest two 
opposite tendencies. 

There must always continue to be two schools of 
financiers — one more theoretical ; the other more prac- 
tical ; both relying on masses of statistics ; both argu- 
ing from different stand-points. The more theoretical 



XV.] THE FUTURE ECONOMIES OF MANKIND. 375 

will strive to realize transcendental ideas ; the more 
practical will strive to arrange interests as exhibited 
about them. 

This native divergence is the first distinction be- 
tween free-traders and protectionists. The former start- 
ing from the universal idea of human brotherhood, and 
the latter starting with the necessities of their own 
home and country. The former pursue the argument 
with a conviction that what is good in the long run for 
the whole must be good for each part ; the latter con- 
fessing ignorance of what should be good for the whole, 
confine their intellectual activity within the scope of 
actual knowledge of what is beneficial to a part. 

Other elements of strife intrude. The commercial 
class (technically so called, as opposed to the class of 
traders) resist by instinct all imposts upon foreign 
goods, and desire to throw the burden of an excise tax 
upon home productions. Especially is this true of the 
very large class of really or virtually foreign merchants 
doing business at American ports. Their interests cen- 
tre in foreign lands, and they naturally wish well to 
foreign manufactures. Their wealth is great, and 
their efforts to influence home legislation are skilfully 
directed. Aliens at heart, citizens only in name, and 
by accidental or temporary residence, their financial 
philosophy leans as much to one side away from the 
truth, as do to the other side the financial propositions 
of those who would gladly support the government (if 
that were possible) by the exclusive taxation of for- 
eigners to the complete relief of its own citizens. 

Between these two extremes ranges the line of theory 
and practice called " Protectionist " ; seeking to impose 
only such a tariff upon foreign goods as shall result in 
founding and making safe and permanent all kinds oi 
human work on its own soil ; so that competition shall 
take place only between the equally liable subjects of 
the home government, and not between tax-payers rep- 
resented at Washington (for instance), and foreigners 
whose conduct cannot be checked in London, Paris, or 
Berlin. A high tariff, at its first send-off, certainly 
enhances the price of manuiactured articles at home. 



376 THE FUTURE ECONOMIES OF MANKIND. [lECT. 

But experience shows this to be a temporary incon- 
venience ; for, as soon as any manufacture is fairly in- 
troduced and extended, competition with itself brings 
down the price nearly to a par with the foreign article. 
And if a difference still remain, that difference really 
represents a higher rate of wages at home, and a better 
profit on the raw material produced at home. 

But, apart from the question of price, Protection to 
home manufactures meets a capital demand of nature : 
that every nationality shall take proper steps for equip- 
ping itself with all the powers, and furnishing itself 
completely with the whole apparatus of civilization. 
Evidently, this cannot be effected so long as foreign 
nations are permitted to feed or clothe or build or 
make for it anj^thing that it really wants and can ac- 
complish for itself. 

Any advancement of the human race in wisdom and 
goodness must result in the general spread of the virt- 
ues of temperance, diligence, honesty and thrift. Any 
accumulation of the popular wealth in the hands of all, 
must render working men more independent of their 
employers and tend to co-operative industry. This in 
its turn will settle wages according to the law of supply 
and demand ; and, finally, the right adjustment of both 
wages and profit in associated trades will arrange 
prices. There is a real price and there is a fictitious 
]jrice for everything. Its real price is the average 
money which would be offered for it, say by a hundred 
thousand ordinarily intelligent people. Its fictitious 
price is what it might occasionally command as bric-a- 
brac, or as a souvenir, or from a capricious, eccentric, 
ov extraordinarily wealthy person. 

The natural price of a manufactured article is deter- 
mined by an estimate of the expense of its manufac- 
ture : 1. So many minutes, hours, days, or years of the 
maker's life -j- the cost of the raw material and tools 
-|- the expense of exposing it in its proper market -j- 
an average percentage of unemployed time between 
the finishing of it and the undertaking of another job 
-f- a percentage of the hours of enforced idleness in 
old age, during which the workman must be supported 
from the profits of his life -f- a percentage. 



XV.] THE FUTURE ECONOMIES OF MANKIND. 377 

His education as a child and for the workshop is not 
counted as a separate item, for that comes into his 
father's account, and regulates the prices of the last gen- 
eration. But the education of his own children and all 
other home expenses taken together determine the value 
of the first element of the calculation. If it cost a 
workman fl.OOO a year to live, as husband, father, citi- 
zen and christian ; and if he can accomplish 6 good 
hours of work in each of 300 days in tlie year, for 40 
years, in a life of 70; then from 40x300x6=72,000 
hours of work he must get $40,000 worth of prices 
over and above all expense of material, tools, shop 
and transportation ; making each theoretical work- 
hour worth to him at least fO 55. Commencing at 20 
years of age and working until he is 60, he must pro- 
vide $10,000 more for the remaining 10 years of his 
life, if his home expenses continue to be the same to 
its close. This will make his work-houi; worth at least 
$0.79. This supposes him to have no interruption in 
business for forty years. Supposing interruptions to 
the extent of 20 per cent., — the worth of an hour then 
rises to $1.00. 

If by the abundance and low price of food, clothing 
and materials he can support his family on $500 a year, 
the natural first price of his manufactured article will 
fall to $0.50 or to $0.40 per hour required for its manu- 
facture. But every indulgence he allows to himself, to 
his wife or to his children, will enhance the price he 
must ask for his hour's work. Every delay in his ar- 
rangements, every detention by a customer, every piece 
of spoiled work, every loss by accident, every play of 
his invention, every change of model compelling new 
calculations or new tools, increases the natural price of 
his working hours by diminishing their number. 

This is the explanation of the supposed stupidity of 
mechanics who obstinately refuse to depart from their 
rules of thumb to gratify the caprice or the intelligence 
of their employers. 

The estimate given above is based on the American 
idea that the man supports the woman by his labor, 
and that the woman earns nothing by her own labor, 



878 THE FUTURE ECONOMIES OF MANKIND. [LECT. 

being wliollv and always occupied in household cares. 
On the basis of French ideas — a basis far sounder and 
more stable in the nature of things, to which all nations 
have been brought down, and on which the American 
nation also in the course of time will be forced to 
arrange its affairs — the woman, sharing the work life 
of the man, shares in the profit and loss account of its 
finance. The wife works with the husband in the field 
and vineyard, in the workshop and office. Thus the 
family time and strength is doubled, and the woman 
who cannot earn as much as the man does more to save 
earnings than the man. On this basis, with this thrifti- 
ness, the cost of living is reduced to one-half, and the 
cost of all manufactures falls to one-half; because raw 
material is itself a manufacture in the first stage, and 
its cost is reduced first. If the American married 
man's hour be worth $1.00, the French married man's 
hour is worth, only 50c. But on this half-pay he and 
his live wiser, better and happier than the American 
family lives on double wages. 

I have no opportunity here to discuss the complicated 
mass of consequences deducible from this principle. 
But it is easy to see that however machinery may 
cheapen comfort for future generations, hand-made or 
brain-made luxuries must in all future ages continue to 
be the private enjoyment of a favored few, or else be 
owned in common and arranged in public places. Pri- 
vate cabinets must give way to public museums. Li- 
braries of rare and costly books must be thrown open to 
all. The gardens of the rich must be combined to 
make public parks. Luxurious symposiums must be 
replaced by municipal festivals. Railroad shares must 
be held in small blocks. 

This change however has already made its mark upon 
the century in which we live. The tendency to a more 
complete realization of it, in the shape of comfort at 
home and luxury in public, is a strongly pronounced 
feature of human destiny while yet that destiny is 
merely a child of the future. 

The item of Intereat was not included in the list of 
price-data given above. There is a destiny for this 



XV.] THE FUTURE ECONOMIES OF MANKIND. 379 

fiction of Interest, also; and its destiny is to vanish 
away out of the calculations and the life of men. It is 
no arrangement of Nature that a baby should be born 
heir to an accumulation of the ownership of the saved 
products of a million days' works of other men through 
the cunning procedure of his father (who in his life- 
time did no more labor himself than any other man), 
and be thereby invested by legal enactments or 
society regulations with the right of living on the 
"Interest "of that accumulated " Capital " his whole 
life through, and that without doing any work at all 
himself. 

" Interest " reveals its true character when it throws 
off the mask of moderation, and appears then with its 
natural face as " Usury." The reason why all enact- 
ments against usury have been acknowledged failures 
is the ground fact that there is no natural distinction 
between usury and interest. Man was born to work, 
and to save from the proceeds of his work a penny for 
a rainy day. Most human beings find no loophole of 
escape from this divine ordinance. Some however do 
escape ; and the efforts of others to escape makeup the 
history of rapine and fraud. Historians know that the 
greater part of the past legislation of mankind has 
really been for the application of physical force to the 
legalization of rapine and fraud. The effort of the 
present generation is to rectify legislation in the inter- 
est of honest labor, to protect it from the prescriptive 
claims of rapine and fraud, formulated in the statute- 
books of bygone generations. 

The worst feature of the system of Interest is not its 
theoretical unnaturalness, and the opportunity it affords 
for hereditary idleness and uselessness, but its practical 
side-effects in establishing a broad foundation for non- 
hereditary idleness and uselessness combined with 
noxious profligacy and wasteful private luxury. The 
imitation of the habits of those born rich and of those 
living on incomes incommensurate with the amount of 
work which they have accomplished, by a large class of 
youthful human beings, whose only wish and endeavor 
is to repudiate their indebtedness to those who work 



380 THE FUTURE ECOISrOMIES OF MANKIND, [LECT. 

for them, leads to this consequence : that the prices of 
all articles of consumption are enhanced to the honest 
on the business principle that " bad debts " on the 
ledger of the manufacturer must be balanced by in- 
creased profits. Every idle man must be supported by 
the workers of the world. Every non-producing fam- 
ily adds to the expenses of producing families. Every 
unpaid debt increases the price of food, clothing, house- 
rent, and furniture to the whole community. The 
habit of drawing interest on money lent is the first 
cause and continual opportunity of the production of 
drones in the human hive ; and its abolition will be one 
of the most necessary and one of the most difficult of 
all the tasks of the future. 

The abolition of Interest will probably be hastened 
by the change going on in men's regard for women. 
Hitherto they have been men's property, carefally 
guarded, and forbidden to work at any trade but that 
of serving and pleasing men. This made one sex — 
one half of every privileged class — one half of every 
highly civilized community — drones. So long as men 
worked only for a shelter from the cold and for suffi- 
cient food, women's house-work equalled and balanced 
man's shop-work; the shop was the house, and the 
woman and the man being constant companions fell 
naturally enough to share each other's employments. 
In planting and reaping and tending cattle, they 
worked in common. And this ' is the case still with 
the most of human beings. But as certain individuals 
and classes became distinguished from the multitude 
by luxury and superior refinement of manners, certain 
women ceased to work at useful tasks and betook 
themselves to embroidery and such like fanciful and 
useless occupations. As "Civilization" spread, and 
men's wealth increased, the female sex acquired senti- 
ments and habits of absolute dependence and physical 
inefficiency. Their maintenance devolved wholly on 
working men. In our day and country, now that men 
consider women their equals in all the rights of life 
except the right of a separate and independent selec- 
tion of work for themselves, and a separate and inde- 



XV.] THE FUTURE ECONOMIES OP MANKIND. 381 

pendent ownership of its proceeds, the extra comfort 
and luxury in which men love to see their women live, 
doubles or quadruples the severity of male labor, and 
the cost of family maintenance. Hence the growing 
number of unmarried men. Hence the multiplica- 
tion of abandoned women. Hence the increasing diffi- 
culty with which lone women sustain life. Hence the 
revival of woman's desire to share in man's hibors. 
Every male trade is besieged with female applicants. 
In course of time, some readjustment and return to 
first principles must be inevitable. Useless work will 
be eliminated from the business of the human race, 
and men and women, together or separately, must 
occupy their minds and hands only with what is 
useful. The proportion of drones — now nearly fifty 
per cent, of the whole population^ — will fall to 30, 20, 
10, 6 per cent. Production will rise as idleness de- 
clines ; and the cost of living will be abated for each 
male and female worker, first by the surplus of work 
done, and secondly by the lessening of the number of 
drones to be worked for. 

But, by this general distribution of moderate means 
to all, the accumuhition of an undue amount of the 
symbol of work (money) in the hands of the few will 
become more and more difficult and exceptional ; while 
a universal and traditional industry will gradually 
metamorphose the fiction of Interest into the fact of 
Dividend. 

Interest and Dividend are contrary terms. For, 
whereas Interest represents an artificial system of 
usury, Dividend represents a natural system for distrib- 
uting the proceeds of labor. It is needless to illustrate 
this further ; it is the key to the future Social Science. 
Its present symbol is the Mutual Savings bank, even 
complicated as that still is with the fictions of Interest 
on money lent; but the symbol in this form of it 
will be exchanged for the better forms of the Building 
association and the Co-operative store, in the just oper- 
ation of which Money makes its nearest approach to 
an identity with Work. 

Money. — This mystic word is destined to a fair illu- 
mination. 



382 THE FUTUKE ECONOMIES OF MANKIND. [LECT. 

Aclergyman of Philadelphia is said to have collected 
16,000 books on the one doctrine of infant baptism. 
When Stephen Colwell died, he left to the University 
of Pennsylvania 9,000 separately bound treatises on 
Money. 

Why so many words to explain vrhat everybody com- 
prehends? It costs the farmer a day's work to get 
a bushel of corn out the soil; and it costs a basket- 
weaver one day's work to make a bushel basket to put 
it in. Barter means that the farmer shall exchange 
his bushel of wheat for the basket; and now the 
farmer owns a basket for which he has wrought, and 
the basket-maker has enough food for his household 
until he can make and sell another basket. 

But Bartering is impeded by a thousand incon- 
veniences. A pledge from the farmer to deliver the 
wheat when the basket-maker wants it will save both 
of them from inconvenience. A piece of gold or silver 
stamped with a mark which all farmers and basket- 
makers have agreed to mean "one day's work" and 
which is known by the name of "Dollar," will enable 
the transfer of wheat and basket to be made at any 
future more convenient season. A piece of leather, or 
paper so marked and so recognized will do this as well. 
But in the case of gold and silver the money (of such 
and such a weight and size) represents also itself a 
day's work, and its circulation is therefore of the nature 
of barter ; but in the use of a leather coin or a paper 
dollar, thousands of which can be made and stamped in 
a day, the barter is confined to the goods, and the 
money is a mere promise to pay. In the case of gold 
and silver coin, the buyer and seller both know that 
the whole human race will recognize, comprehend and 
help to realize the contract. In the case of paper 
money, the buyer and seller have no guarantee beyond 
the genuineness and local reputation for honesty of the 
name upon the note. Facilities for forgery and breach 
of trust are infinitely greater in the one case, therefore, 
than in the other. If, however, these facilities can be 
taken away, — so that the barter can be made as safely 
and surely with the paper dollar as with the gold 



XV.] THE FUTURE ECONOMIES OF MANKIND. 383 

dollar, — then the nature and value of the one is pre- 
cisely the nature and value of the other. 

To do this is precisely the object of every national 
bank system. Banks are but larger individuals, and 
when they deceive, multitudes are wronged. The gov- 
ernment steps in to guarantee the multitudes against 
deceit. If now the government itself becomes fraudu- 
lent, the whole nation must suffer, and without redress. 

Irresponsible governments have done this a thousand 
times. The overthrow of many a government is attrib- 
utable to no other cause. When the late Pope debased 
the Roman franc ten per cent., Napoleon's policy 
being then to protect the Pope, the bank of France 
accepted the circulating coins at their face value ; 
but when Napoleon's policy changed and the French 
brokers would receive the debased coin at only its real 
value, the French peasantry, then discovering . and 
fully appreciating their loss of two sous on every 
franc they hoarded, attacked the priests, and yielded 
themselves to a mad delusion that the Pope had 
moved the Vatican to Germany and instigated the 
invasion of France. From the moment of that fatal dis- 
covery the prestige of the Catholic religion was broken 
down throughout the kingdom ; and the present repub- 
lican and anti-clerical majorities in the Corps legisla- 
tive are a logical consequence. 

Every — the slightest — shade of dishonesty cast on 
the monetary transactions of a government darkens the 
moral and social atmosphere of the nation, even when 
the government is unconstitutional. Much more disas- 
trous are the consequences of fraudulent dealing openly 
enacted by a representative government, for all the 
acts of which the whole population of the republic 
must needs feel itself responsible. The debased coin 
of the United States is nothing else than the ugly 
reflection which the debauched business conscience of 
the nation sees of its own face in the looking-glass of 
its National Congress of law-makers. Still worse is the 
issue of legal-tender notes which violate the funda- 
mental principle of money by carrying no guarantee. 

Geology has no prediction to make respecting the 
future exhaustion of the precious metals. Even if this 



384 THE FUTURE ECONOMIES OF MANKIND. [LECT. 

he engrossed in the schedule of events its date cannot 
be calculated; because, the innumerable gold-washing 
places of both hemispheres indicate an infinite number 
of as yet uu worked auriferous quartz veins ; and, new 
argentiferous regions of extraordinary value are among 
the most recent discoveries. Refinements in metal- 
lurgy will come to the relief of deep mining ; and, bet- 
ter chemical processes wdl diminish the waste of gold 
and silver in the arts. 

To all this must be added the probability of a more 
general prevalence of peace ; the easy multiplication 
and preservation of gold and silver work in private and 
public edifices ; and that cessation of the ancient and 
universal practice of hoarding, by burying coins in the 
earth, which, first in one country and then in another, 
will be the natural result of the introduction of a 
system of paper currency, under the guardian care of 
stable and enlightened republican governments estab- 
lished throughout the world. 

There seems no reason to doubt that the supply of 
the precious metals will always be sufficient for the 
trade and commerce of men ; and all the more because 
due bills, bank bills, and bills of credit will be more 
and more in demand, relieving coin of risk of transpor- 
tation, and in fact of every function except that of 
petty exchange; while the perfection of telephonic and 
telegraphic communication will make the transmission 
of paper money itself to some extent unnecessary. 

The future Commerce of the world is a theme too 
vast for even a fancy sketch. Carriers of goods on 
foot, on horses, asses, camels, oxen ; in bark or hide- 
canoes, which men could lift out of one river and carry 
over to launch in another; in coasting-boats, hugging 
the shore from headland to headland ; or in vessels with 
sails, piloted by the stars — merchants of the desert, of 
the mountains, of the islands of the sea — appear at the 
earliest dawn of history. In all subsequent ages 
some kind of commerce flourished wherever there were 
human beings. Amber, nephrite, the turquoise and 
the pearl, gold torques, bronze swords and chunks of 



XV.] THE FUTURE ECONOMIES OF MANKIND. 385 

iron established its early routes. Rock salt and textile 
fabrics have been its principal burden. The discovery 
of any unknown land was always followed by the build- 
ing of new marts upon its coast, the spread of manufact- 
ures and the building of fleets. The central sea of the 
world became a theatre of commercial competition, war, 
and piracy. The products of Europe, Asia and Africa 
were brought by caravans to its shores. India and 
China traded with the eastern archipelago. Even the 
mound-builders of America had their general trade 
in Lake Superior copper and North Carolina mica, 
which wove the interests of their tribes together, and 
produced a feeble civilization, destined in the end to be 
extinguished by the power of the red Indian, as the 
civilization of southern Europe and northern Africa 
and western Asia had been by Skythic, Teutonic and 
Saracenic invasicfns. 

Trade is the local exchange on equal terms of one 
man's works for another's. 

Commerce is the transportation of cheap goods from 
where they are superfluously abundant to distant places 
where they are scarce and rare and highly valued. 

Trade involves no profit except such as represents 
the deficiencies of a man's livelihood. The parties in 
trade have an equally good knowledge of the worth 
of the things bartered, and in the end come out square 
with each other. 

The parties in commerce were never (until lately) 
on equal terms, except in one respect : to wit, there 
was no true knowledge of the worth of the goods 
on either side ; the whole transaction was done in the 
dark. The buyer could know neither the price of 
the goods at the place they were made, nor the cost 
of their reaching him. The seller knew their prices 
where he got them, but could neither calculate his own 
expenses in transporting them to the place of sale, 
nor what the buyer there would imagine them to be 
worth. Hence all commerce was a pure adventure, 
and had the charm of a gambling risk ; and all com- 
mercial negotiation was a slow and cunning haggling 
over prices between the merchant and the citizen. 



386 THE FUTUliE ECONOMIES OF MANKIND. [lECT. 

In Oriental countries, this essential character of Com- 
merce has bred its like in trade, and not an article is 
bought or sold, even between two people in the same 
village, without the formality of a negotiation respect- 
ing a pennyworth, worthy of some transaction of the 
Rothschilds, or the cession of Epirus by the Turkish 
government to Greece. Even in France and Germany, 
travellers are astonished by the universal fact that a 
price for every article on sale is at first demanded higher 
than the seller will be willing to take in the end. 
Here, it is a mere traditional custom. But in the Ori- 
r'nt it is the consequence of actual ignorance of the real 
price of the article in trade, both on the part of the 
seller and on the part of the buyer ; and as there are 
no fixed values for goods, it takes time for the buyer to 
get the seller's lowest price, and for the seller to find 
out the buyer's highest. 

This ignorance, due to defective general intercom- 
munication, and the total absence of a general advertis- 
ing medium, like the press, converts Trade into Com- 
merce. On the other hand, in the great cities of the 
West, and among the more wide-awake populations of 
northern Germany, Belgium, England, and the United 
States, a perfected system of mutual information has 
converted Commerce into Trade ; and it is surely writ- 
ten in the destiny of the human race that, as time rolls 
on, and the local exchange, the newspaper and the tele- 
graph station get planted in every nook and corner of 
the earth, the home price of every article of human 
manufacture will be accurately fixed and universally 
published, and the sole business of Commerce will be to 
declare the additional cost of transportation, and then 
lapse back into Trade. 

There are four principal methods of transporting 
goods : by wagon, by canal-boat, by rail-car and by 
steam or sailing ships. Trade by canal, and commerce 
on the sea, are exceptional. Trade on common roads, 
and commerce on iron tracks, take and must always 
take the precedency. There are very few parts of the 
earth's surface proper for engineering a canal; and a 
canal, when made, must be of great width and depth, 



XV.] THE FUTURE ECONOMIES OF MANKIND. 387 

like the Erie canal between the Hudson river and Lake 
Erie, to play any important r61e in the commerce of the 
world. Even then, 10,000 boats will only carry 1,500,- 
000 tons of freight at the rate of 2 miles per hour, the 
trip requiring about two weeks ; * whereas, the New 
York Central railroad, which runs beside it, could 
carry the same amount in the same time, delivering 
it at the rate of 100,000 tons per day, but after a 
run of only one day. The cost of freight on the 
canal, however, is less than 3 mills per ton per mile, as 
against a cost of 7 mills by rail. The canal is therefore 
used for slow freight, grain, etc. and the rail for express 
freight and live stock. Railways, moreover, can be 
constructed anywhere, and the Pennsylvania Railroad 
Company alone now operates 7,000 miles of line. The 
whole mileage of railway in the United States is 40,000 
miles, increasing every year. Along all these lines are 
innumerable stations, whence freight is distributed by 
horse and wagon to every hamlet and farm-house in the 
land ; and the number of horses thus employed may 
be estimated from the fact that among the various crops 
of the United States the hay crop has the highest value. 
The tonnage of England's commercial navy amounted 
in 1880 to 10,000,000; that of all other countries to 
11,000,000. At the commencement of 1880 a tonnage of 
430,000 was under construction ; at the commencement 
of 1881 a tonnage of 695,000 ; indicating not only 
the future expansion of ocean commerce in the world, 
but the continued supremacy of the British Empire as 
a commercial carrier for the world. This cannot last 
forever ; but it may last a long time. In course of tune, 
the vast future population of the United States "will 
require a commensurate fleet to export its products of 

* The Erie Canal is 350 miles long, 70 feet wide and 7 feet deep, 
and can float boats of 240 tons freight. It reduced the theoretical 
time of freight from Albany to Buffalo from 20 to 10 days, and the 
cost from $100 to $10 per ton, at once, delivering it at the rate of 
100,000 tons a day. 

The actual use of the canal falls far short of this, for the totial 
of all freight passed both ways on all the canals of Canada in 1880 
was only 4,27(5,820 tons. In Great Britain. 4,700 miles of canal 
exist. 



388 THE FUTURE ECONOMIES OP MA^ISTKIND. [LECT. 

the soil. But the rapid growth of manufactures in 
America will more and more confine the consumption 
of meat and grain within its borders. The wealth which 
England seeks abroad America will find at home. In- 
ternal trade will be a substitute for foreign commerce ; 
as it is in China. Meanwhile the opening of the mouth 
of the Mississippi river is making of New Orleans a 
future rival for New York, and of St. Louis a future 
rival for Chicago. 

Will War ever cease upon the Earth ? is a question 
often asked and never answered. The prophecy of the 
second Isaiah, the glorious Unknown, was a sigh and a 
cry for peace for the Holy Land. But so long as chil- 
dren of Cain and children of Abel are born upon the 
same or neighboring soils, — these with the hereditary 
virtues of a love of peaceful labor and temperate thrift, 
those with a hereditary taint of laziness and greed — 
Fraud d,nd Theft will cultivate the arts of Attack and 
Defence into the science of War. 

As the classic government of force, Tyranny, has 
always been the eminent realization of organized and 
concentrated Theft, it can never exist but as ' both 
product and producer of War ; and as both proof and 
example of the prevalence of the Cain element over 
the Abel element in any age and country. 

Tyranny evinces also the insufficient education of the 
masses; for, as ignorance distinguishes the isolated 
and therefore unprotected individual from the educated 
and therefore united and powerful, the only protection 
for all is in the education and consequent close inter- 
communication and mutual acquaintanceship of all. 

The spread of democratic ideas and the multiplication 
of republics result directly from the increase of popular 
intelligence, by which the real strength of the robber 
class gets measured, and the easy ability of the honest 
multitude to check and suppress schemes of spoliation 
appeals to the common sense of the nation. 

Theft is essentially a vice of the night and of loneli- 
ness. In the light of day and in the midst of an active 
society, all crimes, but especially the world's habitual 



XV.] THE FUTUEE ECONOMIES OF MANKIND. 389 

crime, Theft, becomes too difficult. Popular education 
need not be teclmically moral to ensure a diminution of 
the rapine of kings and nobles, the spoliation of life and 
property by the cunning and reckless. When a people 
become well informed of all kinds of affairs they get 
into a condition to organize intercourse on a reasonable 
basis ; to adjust the various claims of men on men ; to 
tune and temper the great piano-forte of Human So- 
ciety ; to balance rights, and compress wrongs within 
the narrowest limits. Small communities, in which all 
know all, are necessarily better governed, or govern 
themselves better, than large ones. Religiorw has noth- 
ing to do with it. Morality is not in any sense the 
cause, but is the effect of it. And after Good Order 
follows naturally Peace. 

Foreign interference is thereafter the only danger to 
be dreaded. Every ill educated, badly governed coun- 
try is a standing menace to its better educated and self- 
governed neighbors. The great historical mission of the 
Republic of the United States is to illustrate these 
truths on a grade scale, and with exceptional advantages 
of time and situation. But Switzerland, Belgium, and 
now France, have also afforded fair and fine examples. 
Other nationalities are already inchoate republics, and 
will each in its turn realize the ]3rinciple of general 
knowledge, a better order, and greater safety. 

When a war is over, each soldier, after parading about 
awhile, making and listening to patriotic speeches, and 
getting back into the old routine of daily business, hangs 
up his rifle on its hooks, where it has leave to rust as a 
harmless memento of the past. So, nations will, in time 
and turn, put away their standing armies, when there 
are no more kings and nobles, but only artisans and 
tradesmen, scholars and physicians and artists left in the 
land ; with here and there a thief, a sot or an imbecile, 
who will be cared for, each in a proper way. 

When tills process has been fully realized in all coun- 
tries — those now savage requiring of course the longest 
time for it — it seems unreasonable to fancy the con- 
tinual existence of War. 

But meanwhile? 



390 THE FUTURE ECOXOlSnES OP MANKIND. [LECT. 

Ah ! meanwhile, wars must needs recur ; and every 
nation, not cut off from the rest by the ocean, must sub- 
mit to military drill, and stand ready to repulse invasion. 
But is more than that needful ? Probably the growing 
intelligence of Christendom will say No. 

The experience of the Great Republic in the greatest 
of all wars has proved two things : 1. that all parts of a 
nation must be equally well educated if civil wars are 
to be avoided ; and 2. that standing armies are not ab- 
solutely necessary either for attack or for defence. 

The latter truth is enforced upon the consideration of 
the world by the powerlessness of the standing army of 
France in its last war. It was precisely the supposed 
existence of an efficient French army that occasioned 
that war ; although its true causes were dated back in 
the times of Louis XIV, times of rapine and fraud par 
excellence. 

A standing army represents enthroned rapine and 
fraud, whether on the steppes of Russia, on the plain of 
the Ganges, or in the bogs of Ireland. An army of vol- 
unteers is, on the contrary, the people; confederated 
under oath to remain a people, or to die rather than be 
enslaved. But such an army to be successful must be 
honest in its aims and claims, and educated by all kinds 
of work for all kinds of action. Given this, it scorns 
delays, disasters, sufferings and defeats ; it knows itself 
invincible at last. Men who build locomotives, and 
tunnel mountains, and invent the electric light, and 
pipe petroleum a hundred miles, and hang steel bridges 
across Niagara, and transact their business by wire, and 
change their government with the regularity of clock- 
work every four years without disturbance, can on an 
emergency overwhelm their enemies with destruction, 
sink hostile konclads with torpedoes, and improvise 
army for army as fast as their invaders approach. 

If it be the destiny of the human race for all nations 
to become educated, enlightened, equipped with the 
apparatus of civilization, and exercised in self-govern- 
ment, then, it seems to be the destiny of mankind to 
attain to universal order and to universal peace. 

But there resides in the very body of war the subtle 



XV.] THE FUTURE ECONOMIES OF MANKIND. 391 

seeds of its own dissolution. For it is evident that the 
perfection of defence must in the end balance the per- 
fection of attack, in military operations on a large scale. 
The improvement of arms of precision has already 
greatly widened the interval between forces in the act 
of conflict. This changes the sentiment of soldiers; 
which used to be a personal hatred, generated and in- 
tensified by frequent bayonet charges and musketry at 
close quarters. The brutality of cavalry movements is 
also lessened by the rapidity of breech-loading artillery- 
practice keeping off the approach of mounted squadrons ; 
which are now detailed for other service. Sieges are 
no longer scenes of long protracted devil-revelry, per- 
manently demoralizing whole regions. Vast fortresses 
require vast armies of besiegers ; and when one or two 
capitulate, the war is over. It only remains to substi- 
tute nitro-glycerine for gunpowder to make destruction 
too terrible to be practised by reasonable beings. 

Will the Legislation of the future be simpler or more 
complex — less or more vague — more or less operar 
tive ; — more or less satisfactory to all — than it is at 
present ? 

To speak of the formal legislation of past ages is to 
talk of the imperious edicts of some conqueror, the arbi- 
trary enactments of some oligarchy, or some rare and 
fugitive code of a casual tribal law-giver. But in fact 
mankind has ^-Iways spent life under a double regime^ 
the permanent and greater part of which has formulated 
itself in what is called sometimes Custom, and sometimes 
the unwritten Common Law. 

Legal science recognizes this as the fundamental basis 
of all current legislation. Its principles are those of 
property in life, liberty to Avork, ownership of the pro- 
ceeds of work by the worker, family duty and good 
neighborship. Modern legislation occupies itself mainly 
in the writing out of this unwritten common law; codi- 
fying and commenting on it ; simplifymg and applying 
it to occasions as they arise; and providing it with 
executive sanctions. 

The study of it enlarges legal science ; and the prac- 



392 THE FUTURE ECONOMIES OF MANKIND. [LECT. 

tice of it supports the legal profession — a class of ex- 
perts, who naturally gravitate, as lawyers to the courts 
of justice, and as law-makers to the halls of legislation. 
These experts in law are the arguers and deciders of all 
questions in controversy between man and man in re- 
spect of honesty and fraud; and between society and its 
members in regard to every act of crime. They repre- 
sent the common law of all ages as interpreted into the 
thinking and feeling of the day and place. They are 
the voice of every class of mankind complaining of in- 
conveniences or pleading excuses. They are the framers 
of all contracts and the detectives of all disorder ; but 
not as inspired from without society, or from a liigher 
source of wisdom and justice, but as society itself would 
do this, of itself and for itself, if it were not too busy. 

Therefore, although Law and Justice are terms stand- 
ing in the history of philosophy for the absolutely good 
in regard to the ordering of society, they are also and 
universally, in the actual life of the world, merely terms 
standing in the minds of men for the best social ar- 
rangements which they have become acquainted with 
up to date. Beyond this their meaning cannot reach. 
Beyond this .lawyers cannot go. Yet, beyond this a 
certain percentage of law-makers are constantly striv- 
ing to press forward — off from the ground of present 
usage, on to some surer ground of a more perfect jus- 
tice and morality. These advanced men however can 
only proceed at such a rate as will permit the crowd to 
see and follow them ; and the lost prophets of legislation 
have been leaders whose rapid pace in advance of their 
times carried them out of sight. 

Our word morals is the Latin mos, custom, onores^ 
manners. It comes from the Coptic and old Egyptian 
Mes^ a child, to be born, to imagine (conceive ?) 3Ias, to 
introduce, Jier, to rule over, superintend, bind.*' That 
is to say, family order preceded the regulations of society 
at large, and consisted of 1. the authority of the parent 
over the child, and 2. the riglits and duties of children 
in the family. When the family was enlarged to a 
nation, Morality became Common Law. 

* Ma and Mat, truth ; Mak, to think, consider, and regulate. 



XV.] THE PUTUEE ECONOMIES OF MANKIND. 393 

If, as it seems, the life of the whole race is destined to 
parallel the life of an individual man, then, the morality 
of its past childhood (the common law of its present 
adolescence) is destined to grow into the mature and 
more transcendental legislation of its future manhood, 
powerful, energetic, wise and good. 

Law and Legislation are allied terms ; but the distinc- 
tion between them is notable. They are related as 
cause and effect, principle and practice. Legislation is 
the enactment of laws. 

As Laio is represented, on the one side, by Usage^ 
which is common law based on equity, — and on the other 
side, by Legal enactments, which are special permissions, 
prohibitions, limitations and sanctions in the shape of 
punishment (never in the shape of reward) — so Legis- 
lation consists of both Constitutional provisos, and Par- 
liamentary practice. 

The equation, — Common law : Legal enactments : : 
Constitutional provision : Parliamentary practice, is, 
however, analogical, not homological. For, enactments 
are attempts to specify and enforce customary justice ; 
whereas the provisions of a constitutional convention 
are attempts to redress the licentious liberty of the legis- 
lature, by defining its functions, limiting its powers, and 
regulating its practice.*' 

Under Absolute monarchy, all the rights of legisla- 
tion centre in the king. The parliament or legislature, 
if there be one, is merely his cabinet council. 

Under Constitutional monarchy all the rights of leg- 
islation centre in some voting class, whose elected dele- 
gates control the king. 

Under a Republic, based on universal suffrage, the 
whole nation (theoretically) convenes hy delegates to ar- 
range both the constitutional scope, and the legislative 
practice of human rights. 

Delegation hy election is therefore the radical principle 
of modern legislation. 

Sow to perfect the modus operandi of popular elections, 

* " Parliamentary practice " technically so called is merely a vol- 
untary and convenient self-assumption of supplementary rules by 
the Legislature. 



394 THE FUTURE ECONOMIES OF MANKIND. [LEOT. 

for selecting and empowering certain individuals, to legal- 
ize property and conduct^ for multitudes, is the question 
of the future. 

To suppose that this question in any country belongs 
to the past, is to ignore the progress of mankind in 
equity. 

When kings have been obliged to grant the suffrage, 
they have racked their wits to make it as innocuous as 
possible to their prerogative. 

In like manner, with every change of class or party 
domination, the suffrage shifts its garb. At the present 
moment Scrutin de liste and Scrutin d' arrondissement 
are watchwords of civil war in France. Much of the 
time of American politicians is spent in devising schemes 
for apportioning the suffrage to population (or popula- 
tion to suffr^age) in view of coming elections. District- 
ing a State, or " Gerrymandering" a district, has become 
a vile fine art in America. Human cupidity distorts the 
straight lines of Legislation, by first notching the edge 
of the ruler — Suffrage. 

One fundamental maxim must come to be acknowl- 
edged: No man has a right to express an opinion who 
does not hnoiv the subject. And when the subject is 
the fitness of a candidate to act as legislator, expression 
of opinion means — a vote. 

Consequently, no man has a right to vote for a repre- 
sentative of whose fitness for office he is ignorant. 

But thousands vote for statesmen of whom they can 
know absolutely nothing. Millions vote, every four 
years, for the most powerful monarch on earth, the 
President of the United States, in complete ignorance 
of his character and abilities. 

The radical cure for so radical an evil is to be found 
not in the suppression of popular suffrage; but in its 
localization within the limits of personal acquaintance. 

This amounts to saying that the natural form of gov- 
ernment is Hierarchy. 

A republican hierarchy will perhaps be the govern- 
ment of the future. The old English system of " Hun- 
dreds "will be its basis. The elect of the Hundreds 
will be electors for Ward or Township officials; these in 



XV.] TEffi FUTURE ECONOMIES OF MANKIND. 395 

turn will elect County officers; these, in their turn, 
State officers ; these, Congress ; and Congress the Execu- 
tive of the nation. Personal acquaintance and personal 
responsibility will then react upon each other. Con- 
ventions on occasion will regulate and supplement the 
system. 

It is not to be expected that people will yield readily 
or soon to such an innovation. It will be called reaction- 
ary, retrogressive. The Church of Rome and the So- 
ciety of Jesus will be cited as warnings. But Nature 
cares nothing for warnings; neither does the true 
patriot, the true philosopher, nor a fully enlightened 
people. Fate is the embodiment of Patience. The 
Great Republic has only lived one century. Its con- 
stitution was constructed for five or six millions of 
people. In thirty years from now a hundred millions 
will find themselves irked by it. Children are already 
born who will not die before subscribing themselves 
citizens of a nation of two hundred millions of souls. 
By that time forty millions of male votes and forty 
millions of fem^ale votes will be cast together. The 
world has not yet imagined such a contingency; but 
the powers of destiny are preparing for it; and the 
American people are drilling at Organization, without 
knowing that when marching-orders arrive the field of 
action must be Suffrage. 

The common man values more highly his worthless 
vote for Governor or President than his priceless vote 
for School Commissioner, Constable, or Butter inspec- 
tor. When the woman comes to the poll, she will 
arrest this far-off gaze of the man, and turn it upon the 
really important interests surrounding the home, and the 
work-shop. Then, the hierarchical principle, which now 
works concealed in party politics to the mischief of 
society, will sit with dignity, and act beneficently, on 
the throne of constitutional prerogative. 

The disturbing element of national politics is city life. 

The time Avill come when the difference between city 
and country will be estimated and defined and taken 
into account in all legislation, both political aiid volun- 



396 THE FUTURE ECONOMIES OF MANKIND. 

tary. Legislating experts will then be divided into two 
classes, differing from each other as completely as 
mechanical experts differ from chemical experts. No 
city lawyers will be permitted to have a voice in legislat- 
ing for the country ; no country lawyers for the city. 

When each ward in a city shall be made so small that 
its affairs can be regulated by persons personally well 
known to and elected by all the residents in such ward ; 
— ^when each small ward shall have its central edifice 
arranged conveniently and spaciously for all the public 
uses or common purposes of a ward — with an exchange 
room for public conference and discussion — with a com- 
plete library free to all — with legislative rooms for 
committees of all kind — with judicial rooms for arbi- 
tration — with a hall arranged solely and specially for 
public festivals and music — with a theatre room for 
school exMbitions, concerts and dramas — with a ward 
museum of science, and an art gallery of statues and 
paintings — then, competition of a noble kind shall pre- 
vail between these ward edifices and the wards which 
own and use them; and the same social spiritual force 
which now sustains our imperfect church and sunday- 
school system, shall transfer its activity to, and find a 
more fruitful exercise for, its functions in this practical 
sphere of watching over and edifying, in all senses, 
every individual inhabitant of the ward, old and young, 
rich and poor, strong and feeble alike. 

This is what the Future Destiny of Man in city life 
holds up to view. Something like this will be the ulti- 
mate outv/ard shape taken by the genius of modern 
Socialism and Communism, flourishing on its only native 
soil — the city pavement. 

In this regenerated body the vices of the old spirit 
will be ameliorated to genuine virtues. 

Aristocracj^ will also more mightily prevail; inas- 
much as, by restricting the locus and limit of the suf- 
frage, the wisest, strongest and most useful people in 
each precinct will be known and recognized as the best 
class, and be honored and vested with power. This 
honor will be accepted as a sufficient reward, and the 
old vice of Aristocracy, the over-appropriation of special 
and personal privileges to itself, will be suppressed. 



LECTURE XVI. 

THE INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DESTINY OP THE BACE. 

Language is the real cement of a nation; and the 
chief barrier between nations. In the seclusion to 
which a nation is confined by a language peculiar to 
itself, its morality and religion, its tendencies in science 
and its criticism of art, become fixed national manner- 
isms ; distinguishing its character — we may say, its 
personality — from that of every other nation speaking 
a different vernacular and publishing a different litera- 
ture. 

This happens not so much through the habitual use 
of a different vocabulary. It is rather in some peculiar- 
ity of verbal construction and of grammatical inflections ; 
in the employment of favorite particles and untrans- 
latable interjections; in a certain style of statement, 
direct or inverted, by short, sharp sentences or by sen- 
tences protracted, parenthetic, involved and introverted, 
that we must look for the influence of language upon 
national character. The rugged strength of the Roman 
as contrasted with the elegant Greek, — the brusque and 
honest directness of the Englishman as contrasted with 
the Parisian, is more than typified — is partly brought 
about — by the absence of the article, or the absence of 
case endings, from the vulgar tongue. The obscure 
prosiness of German literature, secured by the one rule 
of projecting the prepositional prefix of verbs to the end 
of the sentence, has had its effect upon the thinking of 
the whole nation. The parenthesis, enforced in the ex- 
pression, has reacted on the logic of ideas. Opportuni- 
ties for mystifying the reader, being multiplied by the 



898 THE INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL [LECT, 

indefinitely extensible cliain-work of a sentence, have 
ended by rendering the writer insensible to the risks of 
self-mystifi cation . 

The peculiarity of German metaphysics may be laid 
at the door of what is wrongly enough called the rich- 
ness and flexibility of the German language ; just as 
Locke's and Hume's severe thinking is greatly due to 
what is with equal injustice called the baldness and 
rigidity of English speech. When an unlimited liberty 
to compound long words is granted, the language of 
thinkers gets beyond the easy criticism of their readers ; 
and so, unquestioned mental dictation becomes first 
irresponsible, then arrogant, and finally absurd. But 
when logical terms, postulates, and conclusions are com- 
pelled by the genius of a national language like the 
English to present themselves in single file, they are 
easily reviewed, and must keep their regimental uniform 
and equipments clean and efficient. 

The effect upon the literature of the nation is cumu- 
lative. And the effect of its literature on the character 
of a nation is cumulative. In the lapse of ages, whole 
peoples become thus capable of constantly and on all the 
lines of life, misunderstanding each other. Granted the 
stirpal distinctiveness of Celt and Teuton, there is more 
in the guttural sound of the Swabian cJi or the Prussian 
k to make them aliens in Paris than in all the history of 
the past ; for it affects every individual Frenchman at 
every moment of intercourse. The one word guess, al- 
though brought from England to America in the " May- 
flower," is a redder rag to inflame the national animosity 
of John Bull against the Yankee matadore, than the 
tariff act of 1844; because the one may become a for- 
gotten wrong ; the other continues to be an ever-fresh 
disgust. 

Enough for illustration. Ancient history is full of 
such. The modern world is kept in chronic warfare by 
them. The spread of one language, then, at the ex- 
pense of the rest, must tend to the future mutual good- 
understanding of mankind. If that language be a ner- 
vous, accurate, and copious method of expressing both 
facts and ideas, embodied in a literature of absolutely 



XVI.] DESTINT OP THE EACE. 399 

all that is known, thought, conjectured and proposed, 
produced with lightning-like speed, in infinite abundance, 
— if, in a word, the English language and literature be 
evidently taking possession of the world, and will in 
another hundred years be spoken or understood by a 
fourth part of mankind, — then, the destiny of man for 
a more peaceful, useful, and noble existence obtains one 
more guarantee. 

Inside of the regional limits of each language spoken 
on earth exist many provincial dialects of it, respect- 
ing which the considerations just stated hold good with 
moderated force. Consequently the spread of a lan- 
guage over the earth's surface does not involve the 
destruction of patois, or dialects of speech, but their mul- 
tiplication. But the spread of one literature must extir- 
pate other literatures, or dialects of ideas. Provincial 
expressions, like individual tones of voice, will coiiifeinue 
to make the intercourse of mankind variously pictur- 
esque ; and the birthplace of people will be recogniza- 
ble by subtile indications. But a genuine community 
of ideas, and an honest co-operation for realizing them, 
will as plainly stamp future ages of man's history as 
the superstitious hatred of each other's languages has 
stamped the past history of nations. 

In the beginnings of history Speech was recognized 
as the expression of character; and the most recent 
thinkers can advance not one step beyond this idea. 
The inner life of every animal makes itself outward 
(utters itself) by some appropriate vocal organ. By 
the sounds of their voices we know them, and by the 
words of their mouth the primal language-makers named 
them; as our children spontaneously do now. To hear 
the Vox humana stop play always excites the peculiar 
pleasure of astonishment, because it is known to belong 
elsewhere, and is a delightful intruder. We expect 
hoarse and coarse language from the carnivora, and from 
savages; fine modulated tones and various discourses 
from cultivated creatures. The mocking bird's reper- 
toire depends upon the populousness of its native woods 
and fields. The parrot's tones may be organically 
croaking and screeching, but its high-pitched intellect 



400 THE INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL [LECT. 

allows it to master many phrases if surrounded by nu- 
merous talkers. 

Listen to the monotonous, invariable, space-penetrat- 
ing bleat of sheep and low of kine, the horse's neigh, the 
crow's caw, the chirp of the katydid, the street cry of 
the milkman in the morning. Why so monotonous, so 
invariable, so far-reaching? Because it expresses only 
some one idea, under pressure of instant and pressing 
necessity. Because it expresses some one intellectual 
phenomenon, and leaves all the rest of the universe of 
thought to be elsewhere and otherwise expressed. Be- 
cause the soul of the sheep, the horse, the crow, is an 
embryo soul, enclosed in a body perfect in babyhood, 
and never to advance beyond the narrowest limits dur- 
ing the few months of its earthly existence. What it 
is and what it wants it utters in its cry, — nothing more, 
— o»e cry suffices to express it all. 

The monotonous wailing, and cooing of the human 
baby tells the same story of a limited but precise' knowl- 
edge of vital necessities; a loud, insistent petition 
for help, food, comfort, love, from the Creator in sur- 
rounding Nature. When the child, after passing 
through years of experience, becomes a man, invested 
with dominion over Nature, and inspired with creative 
faculties of his own, his infantile monotones become 
modulated without lunits, as the plaintive sehlag of the 
nightingale passes into its brilliant and exhaustless 
carol. 

The noisy monotonous chatter of vulgar or mal-edu- 
cated people of both sexes is simply an imitation of the 
monotonous, uninflected, barren gabble of the lower 
creatures; while it is as perfect an expression of the 
inner life, as needful and satisfying an exercise of the 
half-developed brain, and as completely successful a 
process for establishing community of sentiment and 
a-ction, on the Avhole, as if it were the table talk of Soc- 
rates and his disciples. 

Educate these chatterers — discipline them by sorrow 
and by labor — cultivate them by study and by travel — 
fill their souls with holy emotions and their minds with 
varied knowledg^e — teach their hands the arts of life 



XVI.] DESTINY OP THE EACE. 401 

and their taste the beauties of nature — and, gradually, 
the chatter dies away and language comes to take its 
place. 

We predict then for mankind in the future, — when 
a more general and generous distribution of wealth and 
leisure shall produce its natural consequence, a greater 
variety of occupations, more movement among men and 
women, — that Human Language will become more copi- 
ous and fluent accordingly. 

The distinction between spoken language and litera- 
ture must, however, be taken into strict account in all 
speculations about the future. This is taught by the 
well known history of the Latin language, which be- 
came the vehicle of communication between the many 
ill-coupled provinces of the Roman Empire, and after- 
wards between all the countries of Christendom, among 
a vast population speaking wholly different languages. 
It was the Latin literature that accomplished this re- 
sult. The clergy translated their latin ideas into every 
vernacular, and in the end latinized the speech of the 
people. English words are thus becoming domiciled 
in all kinds of languages and will gradually expel their 
synonymes, and introduce grammatical forms adapted 
to themselves. The Mandarin literature, with its own 
proper dialect, is now — at the end of several centuries 
— comprehended and employed in all tjie provinces of 
the Chinese Empire, although each province speaks a 
language incomprehensible to the, people of other prov- 
inces. 

The more literature is multiplied the speedier comes 
the day when men will use a common speech. But the 
increase of French and German literature, by the side 
of English, will retard the adoption of English as a com- 
mon human speech. What gives English the chances 
of the field is, 1. the English love of colonization as op- 
posed to the French and Italian passion for home ; and 
2. the perfect willingness which the Germans and the 
Irish show to settle in English colonies and adopt the 
English language as their own. 

The literature of Christendom has suffered two im- 



402 THE INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL [LECT. 

portant physical clianges : 1. the pamphlet of the politi- 
cian has been absorbed into the newspaper ; and 2. the 
folios of the learned have been replaced by octavos. 

Belles-lettres uses now the monthly magazine as its 
chief vehicle,* as the nobleman has learned to ride in 
the railway wagon and the fine lady in the street car 
alongside of common people. The sciences adopt a 
similar vehicle of publication, while learned societies 
are casting their memoirs more and more in the new 
mould of " Journals," or " Proceedings," so as to hasten 
and extend their issue, compelling their authors to 
adopt a more condensed mode of statement and a more 
matter-of-fact style. A species of newspaper for science 
has come into existence — like the London Nature — 
to announce at once whatever seems of interest or 
promises to be important. 

Meantime, books never fail; books large and small; 
books that have cost a lifetime of hard work; books 
that are the ephemeral brood of empty brains; books 
on every conceivable and inconceivable subject of 
human meditation ; books by the million for the mill- 
ion, and books never read but by recluses; books at 
once consigned to oblivion, still-born abortions of un- 
happy love ; and books heralded by the renown of the 
author's genius, long waited for, at once enthroned 
among the glories of the age, and destined to en- 
lighten, charm or sanctify successive generations. 
Judged by the test ,of these, the world is growing 
younger as it grows older, and like an incipient vol- 
cano, the internal heat of God's intelligence glows more 
and more toward its surface. 

That some grand law of constant force operates in 
the production of literature, as in the harvests of the 
soil, in the balance of the animal creation, and even, as 
statistics prove, in the annual percentages and propor- 
tions of accidents, idiocy, insanity and crime, any 
modern list of books will show. One such has just 
been published by Heinrich, of Leipzig, in the Zeit- 
schrift of the German Geological Society, No. 90, Vol. XV. 



XVI.] DESTINY OF THE RACE. 403 

The bibliography of Germany for the years 1879 and 
1880 is summed up thus : — 

1879 1880 
German books of all kinds * 14,179 14,941 

School books and others for the young, .... 2,175 2,446 

Law, politics, statistics, conveyancing, .... 1,683 1,557 

Theology, 1,304 1,390 

Belles-lettres, 1,170 1,209 

Medicine, 732 790 

Natural history, chemistry, pharmacy, .... 841 787 

Historical works, 680 752 

Popular works, almanacs, 642 657 

Fine arts, stenography, archasology, mythology, . 481 533 

Modern languages, old German literature, . . . 485 506 

Agriculture, 421 433 

Miscellaneous writings, 378 423 

Architecture, railways, engineering, mines, naAd- 

gation, 384 403 

Bibliography, encyclopaedias, 278 377 

Geography, travels, 306 356 

War, 337 353 

Maps, 300 301 

Mathematics, astronomy, 158 201 

Philosophy, 139 125 

Forests and game, 103 112 

Freemasonry, 21 20 

And such must be the supply of intellectual food 
furnished to every future generation, improving in qual- 
ity as the world grows wiser and better, and in quantity 
with the demand for it. 

But it is asked : Will not the practical supplant the 
imaginative? Shall not speculation cease with the 
perfection of science ? and poetry with the dissipation of 
error and superstition? and the drama be degraded to 
the level of the text-book? and all fiction become the 
mere story-telling of traveller's adventures, or a realistic 
portraiture of society? Shall the world ever know 
another Homer, Milton, Shakespeare, Kant, or Thomas 
a Kempis? — As well ask if the genius of creation is 
exhausted. As well ask if the heart of the world is des- 
tined to chronic ossification, or fatty degeneration. As 

* The author is not responsible for this total. The table is given 
as a quotation. 



404 THE INTELLECTUAL AND MOEAL [LBCT. 

well ask if in future ages babes are to issue from 
their mothers' wombs monsters of maturity or senility. 
For so long as infancy shall crow on every mother's lap, 
and marriage follow true love of boys and girls, so long 
will rhymes be sung and music lead the dance ; so long 
will the theatre and opera house be crowded, and new 
Mozarts and Shakespeares will supply what shall make 
the bosom of the world heave with passion and its eyes 
stream with tears. And so long as the mist of parting 
spirits shall rise as a thick and constant cloud from the 
planet smoking with the incessant life of death, shall 
holier men fill all lands with tender words of comfort 
for the bereaved, and Imitations of Christ be repeated 
by writers who live nearer, and ever nearer, my God, 
to Thee. 

The reputation of every great poet, composer, histo- 
rian, philosopher and man of science, or religion, has 
been in part factitious; due partly to his genius, and 
partly to opportunities of its display. The delight of 
mankind in the surprising advent of the divine blessing 
has impressed it more deeply on the world's memory. 
Great comets have often lit up the sky ; but those which 
have come in ways and at seasons favorable for human 
observation have claimed precedency of the rest. Many 
have been the conjunctions of the planets Jupiter and 
Saturn ; but only the one that happened to coincide with 
the birth of Christ was named the Star of Betlilehem, 
and will live in story. 

Transcendent genius is not a rare production of any 
age ; but the occasion and the genius must fall properly 
together to excite the hero-worshipping spirit. The 
founder of a dynasty is always accounted god-like. The 
great teacher of a new science is greater than his greater 
followers. The world is easily blase ; a charge of imita- 
tion is the death of reputation ; no matter if the imitator 
be a nonpareil. He who suggests an explanation claims 
mastership over those who furnish it. Such are the 
frailties of fame. We need not fear that when great 
occasions arise souls are not already born for them. 
Troy is buried and there will be no second Homer. 
Manners are so changed that were Shakespeare one of 



XVI.] DESTmY OF THE HACE. 405 

US we should not recognize liim by the dramas he would 
now be writing. Hegel and Schopenhauer have made 
another Kant impossible and undesn-able. Von Baer 
has supplanted Oken, and Agassiz, Von Baer. But as 
these arose at the call of human destiny, a thousand 
more shall sleep for ages until the trumpet of their gen- 
eration sounds ; and so the literature of the world flows 
on, and must ever flow, like the Mississippi or the Dan- 
ube, while rain falls, and grass grows, and the soul of 
God finds utterance through the hearts and minds of 
men. 

And the same question is asked respecting the Fine 
Arts; and shall be answered in like manner. In 
waves like the commotions of the atmosphere, the crea- 
tive faculty in art sweeps across the ages. Renaissance 
succeeds renaissance. We live just now under a high 
barometer of art. The form of Paris, the color of Ant- 
werp, never was excelled and seldom equalled in the 
palmiest days of Italy and Greece. The hell scene of 
Polygnotus at Delphi, unconsciously imitated by the 
unknown master-painter of Pisa, and again by Buona- 
rotti in the chapel of the Vatican, is surpassed even as a 
tour de force^ to say nothing of technique, by the great 
canvases of David and Kaulbach. 

The influence of the physical sciences upon the Fine 
Arts is most curious and instructive. 

In the earliest historical age, the art of sculpture was, 
perfected by a close observation of objects under the^ 
inspiration of family pride and personal affection. This; 
produced the wonderful statues of the monarchs and 
ofiicials of the Fourth and Fifth dynasties of Egypt,, 
found in the tombs of Memphis, dating from at least 
3,000 years before the Christian era. The rude sketches 
of wild animals made on fragments of tusk and bone by 
palseolitluc men were inspired by personal adventures. 

The most ancient scribes of Egypt improved on these, 
when they adopted the forms of birds, beasts, fish and 
human implements as syllables and letters of the alpha- 
bet. No longer solitary woodsmen, but associated deni- 
zens of palaces and temples in the midst of a crowded 
and wealthy population, ihe native spirit of the artists 



406 THE mTELLECTUAL AWD MORAL . [LECT. 

awoke to the delights of praise, and strove for perfection 
of detail. A pre-Raphaelistic fineness of touch charac- 
terizes the carvings and the frescoes of the tombs. But 
a plethora of work induced conventionalism in delinea- 
tion ; and the imitation of nature fell into disuse for re- 
cording the exaggerations of a monarch's successes, and 
for representing the growing absurdities of a compli- 
cated Pantheon. Still further degraded by the hideous 
chimera worship of Phoenician commerce, fused with the 
symbolism of Mesopotamia and Thrace, the art of 
sculpture sank to its lowest degradation. In India and 
China the same effects produced like causes without a 
revival. But Greece, which could evolve the lovely and 
exalted Pythian Apollo from the hideous Tyrian Mel- 
carth, and breed a Solon, Lycurgus, Pericles and Alci- 
biades, an Aspasia and a Sappho, a Socrates and a Plato, 
a Democritus and an Anaximander, could also create a 
Phidias, a Praxiteles and a Polygnotus. Once more 
the imitation of nature became the canon of art; and 
Nature was so beautiful in Greece that Art could 
achieve its masterpieces. But to the Greek, Nature 
meant Man ; and the Florentine boar remains a curious 
anomaly of Greek artistic caprice. 

Painting therefore in our sense of it could not flourish ; 
and landscape painting, to a race of sailors on the most 
picturesque of seas, and landsmen who sat on the stone 
benches of a theatre in the open air surrounded by all 
the glories of land and water to listen to the dramas of 
^schylus and the comedies of Aristophanes, was a dis- 
carded superfluity. The garden frescoes of Pompeii 
probably represent all there was of ancient landscaj)e art. 

When classic art perished at the fall of Rome, and the 
rude Christian symbolism of half-heathen Europe was 
realized in stone and on plaster by mechanics in the 
disguise or in the pay of monks, form and color were 
mere suggestions of spiritual yearnings, and had no 
value of themselves. When the Moslem came, and 
then the Turk, and the learning that lingered in the 
East was exiled to Italy, the lo'^'e of the beautiful awoke 
once more, but still with bat half-dissipated dreams of 
the night ; and its morning was spent in the endeavor to 



Xyi.] DESTINY OF THE EACE. 407 

realize in marble tlie fleeting visions it had got of God 
and the prophets, of Christ and his apostles, of Mary and 
the martyred saints. The doors of the Baptisteries were 
cast in historic panels of the acts of Jesus ; the walls of 
churches became a mosaic of Bible history; or were 
frescoed with the sufferings and triumphs of the Church's 
witnesses. Nature was still the creation, not of the di- 
vine father, but of the Demiurge. The invisible alone 
deserved to be rendered visible. 

But when this sacred task had been well performed 
the artists were set free, and Leonardo and Raphael and 
Murillo began to spiritualize the material and teach 
once more the beautiful in flesh and blood. In the 
North, shut up in commodious homes, the Dutch 
painters began to paint flowers and fruits; and their 
domestic easel pictures reacted on the classic sentiment 
of the South. And so — and so — and so — we see 
what we now see. 

But a great revolution has been in progress. The 
development of criticism in history has made men im- 
patient of those legends which constituted the staple of 
both sculpture and painting. No second Rubens is now 
possible. Allegory has become contemptible. Protes- 
tantism protests against all representations of the great 
Unknown, the mystical and the sentimentally ascetical. 
But Science makes a still more imperative and coercive 
protest against all representations of the unnatural and 
impossible. Never again will be executed a great paint- 
ing of the Adam and the beasts, the Noah and his del- 
uge, the Moses descending from Mt. Sinai, Elijah rapt 
into the sky in a chariot of fire, Jesus walking on the 
water, or Saint Theresa floating in the air. Science per- 
mits the beautiful, the grand, even the cataclysmic, in 
pictorial art ; for these reside and occur in Nature. But 
the modern world, charged as it is already with the sen- 
timent of faet^ and the future informed as it will be of 
every possibility oi fact, will have nothing more to do 
with winged horses and dragon-slayers, cherubim and 
seraphim ; nor endure the least departure from just form 
and color, even for the sake of the holiest sentiment. 

Although the great schools of Munich and Diisseldorf 



408 THE INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL [LECT. 

were never more flourisliing, nor so many artists were 
ever painting in tlie galleries of Dresden, Berlin, Flor- 
ence, Madrid and London, Paris is now the acknowl- 
edged Capital of Art.* Here an intense realism pre- 
vails. Paint wliat you please, but let it be exactly like 
what it is meant to represent ; whether a peasant girl 
returning from the sea flats with a basket of shrimps, or 
LePage's peasant Joan d'Arc, under the apple-tree be- 
fore her cottage, seeing the King and the Madonna in 
her half-entrancement ; whether it be a scene in a ball- 
room or the horrors of a massacre, let every detail of the 
truth be visible. Modern science has made the modern 
Parisian atelier, and explains its dogmas in the lecture- 
rooms of the Ecole Nationale et Speciale des Beaux 
Arts of the Rue Bonaparte. But all its explanations 
sum up in one word, Nature. Its only sentiment is that 
belief in the essential rightness of things as they are, 
considered a priori, which inspires every branch of 
modern science, and all the applications of science to all 
the arts of life, useful and beautiful alike. The ten- 
dency shown by science to ignore the idea of sin as sin is 
therefore frightfully parodied by French art, and a sci- 
entific fanaticism in behalf of the reality and truth of 
the accidents betrays and deplorably degrades the true 
faith in the reality of lawful phenomena. 

It is this feature of modern art which may — or may 
not — in its turn disappear. Surely the Destiny of Man- 
kind shall provide for its disappearance. Surely, as 
vntue increases in the land, pictures of vice will cease 
to be desired, and so cease to be painted. Modern Art, 
drunk with youthful life, is sowing its wild oats. 

The number of pictures is now immense. Six thou- 
sand French paintings executed during the preceding 
twelvemonth were exhibited at the French Salon of 
1880. To distribute these throughout Europe and 
America, to adorn the walls of private dwellings, is the 
work of a few short years. The demand for statuary 
and paintiiig in the United States increases every year ; 

* The reader will get an excellent idea of the facilities it affords, 
from Miss Phoebe Natt's short sketch of them in Lippincott's Mag- 
azine for March, 188L 



XVI.] DESTINY OF THE RACE. 409 

and it will not be long before the supply will be afforded 
by the Art Schools of Philadelphia, New York, Cincin- 
nati, Chicago, and St. Louis, with little aid from Europe. 

Already landscape pictures by American artists take 
rank with the best of the age ; and the equestrian stat- 
ues of Henry K. Brown and the frescoes of William 
Hunt are worthy of a place in any gallery. 

It would be a mere act of philistinism to multiply the 
number of works of art annually executed, by the num- 
ber of years in the coming centuries, to make an esti- 
mate of the boundless treasures of coming generations. 
But it gratifies the heart to predict so much pleasure 
for babes unborn, and to finish our sketch of the physi- 
cal destiny of man by crowning it with these garlands 
of roses. 

But when we reflect that the Fine Arts are no longer 
the exclusive property of the Church and the Aristoc- 
racy, whether of title or of wealth, but have been en- 
listed into the ordinary occupations of trade and manu- 
factures ; and are made especially to subserve the pur- 
poses of Natural History as a branch of Education ; a 
new career is seen to open before them far more exten- 
sive and more important than they have run. Exqui- 
sitely beautiful colored delineations of animals and plants 
are now published by academies and societies of science. 
Photographs of mountain scenery illustrate government 
surveys and geological reports. Photographs and col- 
ored plates of discovered objects are considered indis- 
pensable to good archaeological memoirs. Books of 
travel are now made salable by means of admirably 
artistic landscape and genre paintings. Even Encyclo- 
paedias are now illuminated like old Missals. The influ- 
ence of the sciences is everywhere apparent in the trans- 
ference of the work of the artist from the capricious 
service of ih.Q powerful and wealthy few to the constant 
and reliable service of the millions ; not so much with a 
view to their amusement, as under stress of educational 
needs. Primary education bids fair to become in great 
measure pictorial, and the stimulation of the young 
mind is intrusted to those who can make the world it 
enters as picturesque as possible. 



410 THE INTELLECTUAL AND MOKAL [LBCT. 

The Architecture of the Future will not be confined 
to gorgeous edifices, but will more than rival the great- 
est works of the most practical races of ancient and 
modern days. Every city will be flooded with water 
like Imperial Rome ; and every river will be spanned by 
as many bridges as the Seine in Paris. 

Accumulation is the work, the test, the legacy, the 
glory of Time. 

Time buries all the labor of man, sings the poet. 
Nay, — that is not Time's doing. Time is innocent. 
War, man's true fiend, throws clown his edifices and 
heaps one ruined city on another. So, when wars shall 
cease, ruins will be replaced by new monuments, more 
and more substantial and grandiose ; and the spread of 
the old schools and the rise of new ones, shall prevent 
the traditionally beautiful from being forgotten; the 
lovely shapes of past ages shall be abundantly imitated ; 
and a thousand new combinations and fresh lines be 
introduced. As Peace and Plenty have restored all the 
cathedrals and some of the great castles of France, and 
protected those of England from decay ; as the Dom at 
Cologne after waiting for centuries has been just com- 
pleted out of the contributions of all Germany ; and 
Sanctus Paulus extra Muros rebuilt with unrivalled 
splendor by a living Pope ; and St. Patrick's cathedral 
rises in New York in the very form which it is the fash- 
ion to consider extinct ; so, as peace and plenty spread 
to Greece and Syria and Egypt, — to Bagdad and Can- 
dahar and the sites of ancient Bactrian splendor, — the 
styles of all ages will revive from their graves. Ruined 
monuments which are now but the study of the anti- 
quary, will inspire a host of native architects in every 
land with patriotic zeal. The past wiU live again in its 
very dress. The quarries of Syene and Baalbec will be 
reopened. The obelisques will be replaced, the Col- 
umns of the Sun re-erected and the tower of Babel re- 
built. But near them will also rise Oriental railroad 
stations and houses of parliament, grand opera houses, 
museums, and Walhallas, of styles produced by the in- 
termarriage of the genii of the East and West. 

How large a role religion will play in the Architecture 



XVI.] DESTINY OF THE EACE. 411 

of the future may be guessed from the knowledge we 
have of the intimacy existing between the sensuous 
imagination and the sentiment of providence. Every 
kind of religious worship has cultivated a grandiose 
architecture of its own. If men must always be relig- 
ious and affect associated worship, directed by a priestly 
class, then, the larger the Ecclesia, the larger the House 
of God; the more devout the worshippers, the more 
magnificent the ritual ; the greater the accumulations of 
wealth, the more lavish the expenditure ; but the style 
will vary with race and climate as before. 

The possible Education of the whole human race is 
evidently not a question of kind but of degree. The 
widening of favorable circumstances ought always to 
multiply the number of the instructed, Avhether the 
greater multitude pursue a higher curriculum or not. 
It is easy enough to prove that a very small percentage 
of any nation or race can ever become exceptionally 
learned ; and that the millions will in all future ages be 
too busy and too poor to gain more than a primary edu- 
cation. If the race of man be left to inhabit the earth 
tens of thousands of years, as is most likely, a university 
course must always be a privilege, a prize, a good fort- 
une, and a special blessing. This will even become 
more and not less the case through an increase of gen- 
eral peace, plenty and prosperity ; for with these go 
hand in hand ease of marriage and a swelling tide of 
births ; consequently a denser population ; consequently 
a severer struggle for life, a more imperative confine- 
ment to place and occupation, lower wages, an increase 
in the number of hours of work, and the shortening of 
the term of years of schooling for children. The dense 
ignorance of the English population has been produced 
in this way by the exceptional enhancement of employ- 
ment for men, women and children alike ; while the 
extraordinary general intelligence of the people of the 
United States tells the same tale. For, land being un- 
bounded, and food superfluously abundant, no crowding 
has yet taken place; life is easy ; women are left to breed 
and nurse children ; and children are not called upon to 



412 THE INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL [LECT. 

help support the family until they have nearly or quite 
reached their majority. Two hundred years hence the 
great multitude of Americans will be no better educated 
than the multitudes of Germans in Germany are to-day. 

And this must needs happen in spite of the advance 
of science, in spite of the pulpit and the j)ress, in spite 
of Educational Bureaus, Boards and Societies, and quite 
apart from the also inevitable pro rata increment of 
private and common schools, normal schools, colleges 
and universities. 

The signs of the working of Nature's law to this effect 
are already patent, in a reaction against the forcing proc- 
ess to which American youth of both sexes are now 
subjected ; and in the healthier tone of public sentiment 
respecting the disastrous consequences of over-educating 
the children of hard-working parents, who must be hard 
workers themselves, or become burdensome to the Com- 
monwealth. Already " a higher education " is becom- 
ing a privilege and prize out of the reach of the majority 
of honest people. 

Is this pessimist doctrine ? By no means. It simply 
teaches that the bulk of the human race must work all 
their lives ; and consequently cannot learn in childhood 
anything more than to read, write and cipher ; nor in 
adult life things unconnected with their daily employ- 
ments. This is the general destiny of mankind where- 
ever it increases and multiplies on the face of the earth. 
And when the whole surface of the globe is filled with 
a laborious, honest, peace-loving, orderly, moral and 
religious multitude this destiny will find its grandest 
exhibition. 

In nothing so well as in education does human des- 
tiny proclaim its mission of sufficient good for all, and 
no m.ore. In nothing is "the Possible" so evidently 
limited for each as to quality, and so evidently unlimited 
for all as to quantity. No human being will ever suc- 
ceed in becoming more learned or wiser than certain 
men and women have already been, or than not a few 
individuals now living are. And the same is true of 
goodness ; of genius ; of force of character. The acme 
of quality was long ago reached in the destiny of indi- 



XVI.] DESTINY OF THE EACE. 413 

viduals, and will be reached in many more in all coming 
ages. 

But the bright destiny of the race is this : — the num- 
ber of the suffieiently good, wise, learned, skilful, ener- 
getic, honest, thrifty, temperate and chaste will increase 
— ever increase — perhaps at times more rapidly in- 
crease, under the influence of proper instruction be- 
stowed on all at an early age ; until the last traces of 
the brutish populations which still infest — rather than 
inhabit — all countries under the sun shall have dis- 
appeared ; until by successive generations of sufficiently 
taught children a disposition for useful knowledge shall 
become generally hereditary and unbiassed traditions of 
the true and beautiful shall direct the conduct of every 
family and every state. 

The quantity of virtue and the quantity of intelli- 
gence will then be infinitely great ; while the quality of 
neither mercy, justice nor truth, in any individual, will 
be any more illustrious than it is now. 

To bring this about we recognize three necessities : — 
1. The compulsory education of all children without ex- 
ception ; 2. The education of woman on a full equality 
with man ; and 3. The co-education of the sexes. 

The compulsory education of all children is now so 
soundly accepted as to be enacted by the most enlight- 
ened governments. The only objections to it which de- 
serve a patient hearing are drawn : — 1. From its sup- 
posed interference with the right of parents to decide 
the fate of their offspring; 2. From its supposed exas- 
perating effect upon the lowest classes of society ; and 
3. From its dreaded invasion of the domain of this or 
that established church or religious sect. 

The first objection represents a sentiment proper to 
past ages, when the woman was accounted property, as 
well as her children, by the husband and father. 

The second objection is urged against compulsion as less 
effectual than persuasion, and bearing sour fruit. But it 
must be acknowledged by all who study the lower forms 
of social life, that, as justice must be mixed with mercy 
and sternness with sympathy, so the worst evils can only 
be rooted out vi et armis, and cliiidren who are compelled 



414 THE ESTTELLECTTJAL AND MORAL [LEGT. 

by vicious parents to learn how to ruin themsehes and 
infect society should be compelled by society to reform 
tbemselves and learn wisdom in spite of tbeir dreadful 
surroundings. Compulsory Education is compulsion, 
not for tlie helpless child, but for the criminal parent. 
Society knows that it can reclaim and save the child by 
a' strong hand and an outstretched arm even when the 
parent of the child is unreclaimable and destined to 
destruction. 

The tliird objection is a despairing cry from Supersti- 
tion, seeing in the rising sun only a warning to depart 
back to the hell it came from. 

All living things have been endowed with instincts 
how to live. 

Human society has a divine inspiration how to live in 
every age and stage of its existence. The polity of a 
savage tribe is as perfectly well ordered for its circum- 
stances as that of the most enlightened civilized govern- 
ment for its circumstances. It is idle to object to the 
compulsory instruction of the cliildren of a compact 
community in that kind of knowledge which the major- 
ity of its healthy members feel to be most needful for 
the common weal. The brain demands food for itself, 
for the heart, the lungs, the liver, the kidneys, the 
spleen, the muscles and the nerves, even where the 
stomach rebels. Priests who fight against a common 
school system are precisely the diseased entrails of the 
body politic. 

The education of the female sex to an equal degree 
with that of the male sex is distinctly predicted by the 
current history of the United States and England. In 
other countries woman is still regarded as a breeder, 
cook and nurse, for man's benefit. The birth of girls is 
a necessity for securing the continuance of the male 
population of the world. The education of woman is 
discouraged in view of her probable interference with 
the political monopoly enjoyed by man, and of her cer- 
tain competition with man in the crafts and trades. 
The more skilful the art, the more jealous the artisan 
and artist. Physicians abhor female' medical students. 
Painters exclude women from their studios. Preachers 



XVI.] DESTIISTY OF THE RACE. 415 

announce the word of the Lord that women must be 
silent in the churches. Critics scoff at the ability of 
woman to write an epic or compose an opera. Men of 
science patronize female observers, but expect from them 
no discoveries of natural law. Politicians bar against 
the sex of the house every exit to the street and every 
entrance to the forum, on the pretence that the street 
and the forum will convert them into men ; but in real- 
ity for the purpose of keeping the sex of the street inde- 
pendent of the only influence which can cleanse the 
street and ennoble the forum. 

As all laws are made by men alone, without consulta- 
tion with women ; as all lawmakers are elected by men 
alone, women being excluded from the polls; as all 
judges, barristers, jurymen, sheriffs, policemen, jailers, 
all boards of control, all school directors, in a word all 
parts of the machinery of the government of male and 
female society are composed of men alone — the female 
element being wholly and absolutely excluded — liberty, 
independence, self-government, democracy, civilization, 
are terms which have only an accidental meaning for one- 
half the human race, and mark the progress of only that 
half in the destiny of the race. The Destiny of Man 
can fully work itself out only after the abolition of the 
factitious political distinction which is now everywhere 
made between the two sexes ; when women shall govern 
men as thoroughly and regularly as men now govern 
women; when the male and female mind and con- 
science combined shall regulate male and female society 
regarded as a unit. 

This is the newest sentiment of our day, and will 
become the dominant sentiment of future ages. 

This sentiment is born, of the education of woman, 
and will prevail in proportion as the sex is educated. 
The intellectual genius of woman, aborted by the skil- 
ful management of the male sex liitherto, asserts its 
rights, and recuperates its power, by tearing the mask 
from the face of injustice, and by disrobing society so as 
to reveal its hideous sores ; claiming that woman alone 
can heal these sores; and in order to do this must be 
granted her just share of public power. 



416 THE INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL [LECT. 

The battle whicli women are winning is the first of a 
fine campaign ; the first, against their fathers, husbands, 
brothers, and sons; the rest, against adulterers and 
seducers, dishonest guardians and trustees, pilfering 
office-holders, slanderous newspaper editors and obscene 
book writers, lazy officials, brutal jailers and madhouse 
keepers, uneducated nurses, drunken, stupid school direc- 
tors, licentious theatres, the gambling hells, and that 
crowning woe of the city world, innumerable rows of 
grog-shops, sucking in by day and night the precious 
heritage of women, spoiling all that would be lovely in 
life, and breeding all that is deadly for future genera- 
tions. 

All these evils are represented by the male sex — by 
individual men, in close consultation among themselves, 
relieved of the restraints of the presence of good women, 
unchecked by their remonstrances, unenlightened by 
their information. The legal concurrence of one well- 
educated, right-minded woman would in most instances 
suffice to reorganize on a noble basis the ignoble con- 
duct of legislature, court, and council chamber. How 
perfect would be the reform were an equal number of 
men and women to sit at every public board of manage- 
ment and control ! 

But the women selected for this task must be ivell 
educated; and to educate such individual women, the 
whole female sex must be well educated. But a good 
system of female education will inevitably react to 
improve the education of the male sex. And to perfect 
the operation the two sexes must be educated together. 
To do this rightly boards of school directors must be 
composed of both sexes. Are not mothers as much the 
owners of children as fathers are? And what do men 
know of the proper mode, means and degree of the edu- 
cation of girls ? Yet all school directors are males. 

The induction of women into the rights and powers 
of school direction is the hinge on which turns the 
opening door of the coming civilization of iho, human 
race. This is all that is needed to secure the selection 
of fit teachers for children. From these will come the 
advanced teachers of the future. The general improve- 



XVI.] DESTINY OP THE RACE. 417 

ment of primary education will result in an increased 
number of women capable of higher instruction. Al- 
ready the whole field of human learning is open to culti- 
vation of woman at Oberlin (women have been admit- 
ted at Oberlin since its founding in 1835), Ann Arbor, 
at Cornell, at Swarthmore, at Northampton, at Pough- 
keepsie. Even the venerable seats of learning at Boston 
and Philadelphia have been compelled to grant quasi 
university courses to female students. And Cambridge, 
old Cambridge in England, grants diplomas on the sly 
to those of the disfranchised sex who demand them vig- 
orously. In time the superb creatures who taught 
science in the still older universities of Italy will have 
a host of equal successors lecturing and demonstrating 
from the professors' chairs of the future. Even now 
female doctors of medicine, philosophy, chemistry, letters 
and arts are founding schools of their own and laying 
the basis for a general education of their own sex equal 
in all respects to the general education of the other sex, 
hitherto its master, henceforth only its rival.* 

Slow and sure is the word of the Lord. Step by step 
the destiny advances. By insensible gradations the 
dawn melts into daylight. Line upon line and precept 
upon precept, here a little and there a little, the race 
of mankind becomes aware of its fate. One nation 
after another opens its sleepy eyes and slowly gets upon 
its feet and goes to work. Minister of Public Instruc- 
tion, Mr. Ferry, has just issued orders to the school-mas- 
ters of 40,000 parishes in France to meet in their 2,000 

* See six reasons why the English University of Cambridge 
" should be one of the leading centres of female education," in a 
paper issued from Cambridge in view of the discussion Feb. 24, 
1881, — in Nature of that date, page 394. Oxford, too, is going in 
the same direction as Cambridge, very fast. The first woman stu- 
dent has been admitted to the Sorbonne at Paris, and to the Uni- 
versity of Berlin : and there are a great number of women students 
at a university in St. Petersburg. The first woman has just been 
graduated as Dottressa in the Papal College at Rome. In the 
United States all the new State Universities, founded on the great 
Government land grant, admit women, I think : and in Wisconsin, 
Minnesota, Kansas, Iowa, Indiana, California, etc., are rapidly be- 
coming great centres of learning. Indeed it would be hardly pos- 
sible now to establish de novo a great university for the education 
of men alone. 



418 THE INTELLECTIJAL AND MOEAL [LEOT. 

district towns and send up delegates to a Scliool Con- 
vention at Paris. Two thousand select school-masters 
of the Republic will there discuss the best measures for ( 
perfecting the general education of the nation. Switzer- ' 
land is converting itself into a Central University for 
Europe. Germany has carried the primary education of 
boys and girls to the highest pitch, but still hesitates to 
permit girls to advance beyond the rudiments. In the 
course of another century or two the popular learning of 
the West will invade the Orient ; and the already long 
since well established school system of Cliina will be 
applied to the rapid spread of right knowledge through- 
out the most populous region of the globe. 

As the result is already predetermined and inevitable, 
there is no need of passion in advocating the means for 
producing it. Fanaticism is out of place. The women 
of America are not called upon to abuse the men for 
doing only half the work. Their own duty lies before 
them, — to do the other half. 

The Co-education of the sexes is the tlurd aspect of 
the subject. It needs no argument. It is certain to 
prevail. It has been tried and been successful. The 
hostility of the male sex to it arises from either an im- 
pure and an ignoble timidity ; from a superficial knowl- 
edge of natural laws; from deep-rooted prejudices in- 
herited from unenlightened ancestors fostered by the 
half-enlightened conversation of society ; or, from lack of 
faith in the native worth of woman's practical character; 
and at the same time from an obscure instinctive pre- 
monition which inconsistently enough affirms to them 
that the female sex, superior to the male in everything 
but physical strength and mental energy, is destined to 
resume its prehistoric r81e of government, and to per- 
form most of the legislative functions of society, leaving 
the executive in the stronger hands of men. 

Safely leaving the common-sense of Avhole populations 
to take care of popular education on the plain, and turn- 
ing to contemplate the peaks of human learning climbed 
by the few, an inspiring spectacle awaits us. Thou- 
sands and ten thousands of investigators occupy the 
scene. Although a minute proportion of the myriads 



XVI.] DESTINY OF THE EACE. 419 

that populate the earth, this scattered multitude — scat- 
tered, but in complete communication with each other — 
fulfil all the laws of discovery and distribute the pre- 
cious fruits of research to feed the hunger of the uni- 
versal mind. No more pedantry — no more scholasti- 
cism — no more crude conjectures — no more supersti- 
tions. All, knowledge ; won by investigation, and tested 
by experiment. Men of science, the future order of 
nobility ; teachers of facts and laws and uses and meth- 
ods, the acknowledged leaders and rulers of society ; 
incipient intellect, the object of the most sedulous fos- 
tering care ; charlatans, drowned in the sea of real 
learning on which they spread their sails ; cant, replaced 
by simple lucid demonstration; truths, painted in the 
perspective of great and small, important and unimpor- 
tant, each subordinate to the natural hierarchy of phe- 
nomena, and the good and beautiful made always and 
in all cases to rank the commonplace ; schools, colleges, 
universities, purged of all obstructive or repressive rou- 
tine ; the graduation of capacities, strict yet generous ; 
the forward advancement of the best endowed, no longer 
hindered by an inert mass of stupidity favored by fort- 
une ; endowments, plentiful and adequate and wisely 
administered, not by the rules of trade, nor for privileged 
classes, but by men expert in education, and for those 
whose natural abilities it. will pay the world best to 
favor. ^ 

Dead men's legacies have crushed the Universities. 
A city should own its University, not merely have it ; as 
a curiosity for visitors to look at ; or a convenient wall to 
which a private citizen may now and then affix his ceno- 
taph. The day comes when the city will no more leave 
the maintenance of its University to private chance or 
caprice, or to the accidents of trade, than its maj^or's 
office, its council chamber, its court house, its alms- 
house, its hospital, or its prison. To drain the city of 
ignorance is as obligatory a duty upon all as to drain it 
of filth. To furnish the city with an abundance of the 
best science is as imperative a part of good government 
■as to provide a plenty of pure water, or gas-light. The 
common and high schools are supported by general tax- 



420 THE INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL [LECT. 

ation ; the University, tlie culmination of the educational 
system is still left to chance. 

In England the perversion of ancient wealth at 
Oxford and Cambridge to the delectation of aristo- 
cratic pride and indolence has become a scandal and 
a nuisance. What those celebrated beds of roses could 
be made to produce — and will surely soon be made 
to produce — is thus stated by Max Miiller in his recent 
address in the University College, London : — 

To compare the work that Oxford or Cambridge could do and 
ought to do, with that of any other university, whether British or 
Continental, is simply absurd. Oxford, with its excellent material, 
the well-fed and well-bred youth of these islands ; Oxford with 
its many students who have not to work for their bread ; Oxford, 
with its rich colleges and libraries and fellowships, can do for the 
advancement of learning fifty times over what Giessen or even 
Leipsic can do. Oxford and Cambridge could beggar the whole 
world and make the old universities the home of all English genius, 
all English learning, all English art, all English virtue. 

The plan he proposes is a simple one. Prize fellow- 
ships are in future to be tenable for five or seven years 
only. He proposes that, if a Fellow has then developed a 
taste for scientific work and wishes to continue it, he 
shall have a second fellowship with duties attached, like 
those of the Extraordinary Professors in Germany. Let 
the few who hold out another five years receive a third 
fellowship and become Ordmary Professors for life, with 
an income from ^he three fellowships of <£ 1,000 per 
annum. 

But if the ancient endowments of the two English 
universities are to be thus utilized for future work, the 
same improved public sentiment which works the change 
in them will gradually effect a more radical enhancement 
of the University system, in other countries, so soon as a 
few democratic revolutions shall have overthrown the 
existent governments fortified by standing armies, and 
the millions now taxed for war shall be competent to 
tax themselves for knowledge. The destiny of nations 
is not merely to beat swords and spears into ploughs 
and pruning-hooks, but to eject the soldiery from forts 
and fill their places with astronomers and meteorolo- 



XVI.] DESTINT OF THE EACB. 421 

gists; to convert barracks into universities; and to 
supply men of science with an artillery of researcli as 
efficient and not half so costly as the equipment lav- 
ished upon troops. 

The Philanthropy of the future : what may we expect 
it to be? The same in kind, degree and method as it 
has been in the past? Or, something nobler, greater, 
wiser? 

Surely the growth of general intelligence must affect 
philanthropic conduct. The better knowledge of human 
distress will widen and deepen the sentiment of pity ; 
and the acuter and more thorough investigation of its 
causes will modify the practise of its cure. 

The first need of civilized man is a good home. 

Tenement houses for the poor represent the two oppo- 
site poles — of squalid misery and of cheap comfort. 

Left to the selfishness of impious wealth the arrange- 
ments of life for the outcast classes are the last desper- 
ate lairs of wild beasts in districts from which the 
pressure of surrounding superior species threatens exter- 
mination. Committed to the wise benevolence of pious 
wealth the arrangements of life for the classes which are 
always on the verge of becoming outcast are sweet, 
wholesome, hopeful and thrift-inspiring. 

Where, as in Philadelphia, a whole population can by 
a little foresight and self-government easily save and 
build their own dwellings, at an average cost of from 
$1,000 to $1,500, over a wide space, all goes well. 
Where, as in London, millions are cramped and crushed 
into a sweltering mass, a divine philanthropy is called 
for, and becomes illustrious through such success as that 
which has followed the application of George Peabody's 
bequest of $2,500,000. In 17 years eleven blocks of 
houses for the poor have been erected in various quar- 
ters of the great metropolis, at a cost of $2,750,000; 
constituting 2,355 separate dwellings, with 5,170 living 
rooms (besides bath-rooms, laundries and wash-houses 
free in common), inhabited by 9,899 persons, on an 
average rent of $1.00 per week per dwelling, and $0.50 
per week per room, with a death rate of 19.71 per 1,000 



422 THE INTELLECTUAL AND MOEAL [LECT. 

(2.49 less tlian tlie death rate of tke city as a whole). In 
1881 other blocks will be built adding to this saved 
population 3,500 persons more. 

The tendency of a part of mankind to crowd into 
cities is as natural as the occlusion of hydrogen in the 
pores of a mass of iron. But it is a mistake to suppose 
that cities grow by this process ; theh growth is organic 
like that of a peat bog. At first the}^ are planted from 
without ; but once established, they enlarge themselves 
from their own seed-vessels. This is proven by the 
history of a normal city like Philadelphia, in which every 
married couple strives to live m a separate house. By 
comparing the annual number of native-born youth of 
both sexes who come of age, and maj be supposed to 
marry, — and the annual number of houses built, — the 
two numbers will be seen to agree. It follows, then, 
that the number of new comers to settle in the city is 
about balanced by the number of native-born citizens 
who migrate from it. ' 

Every great .manufacturing city obeys this law of 
normal organic growth, and may be safely left to its 
normal arrangements for cleansmg itself of its, own 
offal. But great commercial ports like New York, Liv- 
erpool, London, Marseilles, Alexandria, Calcutta, Can- 
ton, have a double growth. Besides the native growth, 
there is an afflux. And besides the immigration, which 
is mostly not harmful but useful, there is a floating 
population of sailors and traders and criminals. These 
have to be regulated specifically. 

Tramps and professional beggars and criminals are the 
outgrowth of times of special social disturbance, like 
the American civil war of 1861 or the Bulgarian rev- 
olution ; or, to cite the most notable of all examples, 
like the Tai-ping rebellion in the Chinese Empire, 
which lasted 20 years, and in its sixteenth year de- 
stroyed 10,000,000 lives in one province alone. But 
they are chronically produced by any standing malad- 
justment of the apparatus of social life ; such as a long 
continued disproportion between supply and demand ; 
or a succession of bad crops ; or the development of 
gold, diamond and oil regions ; or a permanent occupa- 



XVI.] DESTINY OF THE KACE. 423 

tioii of an empire bj incompetent foreign rulers, like 
the Turks. 

The hope of the future is, that such disturbances, 
whether sporadic, or continuous, will become rarer, and 
through the spread of intelligence and the enforcement 
of just laws by all and for all, cease to afflict humanity. 
When the Turk, the fanatic and the usurer fail, man- 
kind will find no excuse for rebellion, civil war and 
theft. But a shrewd and active philanthropy must 
substitute itself for the mischief-breeding domination of 
the honest many by the dishonest few. 

Philanthropy should be the science of Hygiene re- 
specting Roguery in society. Hitherto it has neither 
been a science, nor has it had roguery in view. On the 
contrary, it has been a mere sentiment of fanaticism, 
selfish in its own nature, and wholly unaware of what 
its own name meant. One of the worst misinterpreta- 
tions of Christianity has been the popular clerical doc- 
trine of the virtue of almsgiving per se, and of its heav- 
enly reward as such. Men will learn in course of time 
that Benevolence becomes Malevolence through unen- 
quiring almsgiving ; and if God in assigning his rewards 
regards the consequences of conduct, the paying teller's 
desk at which such Benevolence must present its 
warrants is certainly not in Heaven. 

The cure for beggary is not compulsory labor ; but 
a humane and sympathetic instruction and assistance ; 
having for its object, first, a revival of the beggar's self- 
respect, and secondly, a stimulation of his pride in self- 
support. The beggar must have a new set of ideas and 
feelings forced into liim ; and then, a chance given him 
to realize the ideas, and gratify the feelings. Alms- 
giving is as bad a medicine for unthrift, as is whiskey 
for low spirits ; and works woe in the same fashion. 

The old time recipe to cure a cat is to make disgust 
rectify its intellect. So the only effectual cure for 
sordid unthrift and that pretended starvation which 
appeals for eleemosynary relief, is the application of 
doses of real and actual starvation ; administered not at 
all as a punishment ; nor, in the spirit of a family physi- 
cian dealing with a case of gout or gluttony ; but, on 



424 THE INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL [LECT. 

the principle of the Socratic method of reasoning with 
a sluggish mind or indifferent scholar. When beggars 
really come to starve, which, unfortunately, so-called 
Christian Benevolence takes good care to prevent, they 
not onl}'" begin to listen to certain questions which 
Nature has been asking them in vain, but they begin 
also to feel the force and bearing of said questions; 
and then — and not till then — they cast about to find the 
answers. 

It is the business of Philanthropy to be on hand to 
help them comprehend the questions and suggest the 
answers. 

Organized Charity — this is the discovery of our age ; 
this is the last analysis of the teachings of Jesus ; this is 
the arena in which future saints and sages may compete 
together until the saints become sages and the sages 
saints ; this is the apparatus by which alone Human 
Society can relieve itself of the miseries of poverty. 
" The poor ye shall always have with you." Certainly. 
But not necessarily stupid poor, lazy poor, sordid poor, 
dishonest poor, licentious poor, miscliievous poor, dis- 
gusting, degraded, drunken, haggard, howling, evil-eyed 
and foul-mouthed poor, whining in the streets for a six- 
pence, exchanging it for a glass of whiskey, and holding 
out the hand for another " for the love of God." Yet 
this is precisely the species of poor which the popular 
doctrine of Christian Charity breeds. 

Jesus fed the multitude which followed him into the 
desert; but he gave no sixpences "for the love of God.". 

It is reported that once^ to one person, he said, " Sell all 
that thou hast and give to the poor." But it is not re- 
ported that he ever gave money to the poor. Only once 
does he seem to have given bread ; and then the occasion 
was desperate ; the hungry were in a desert, where they 
could neither make food nor earn wages. 

Responsibility is the touchstone of that Penury which 
it is lawful to relieve. The first duty of every creature 
is to provide for itself. The creature that responds not 
to this law of the Creator perishes — sooner or later. 
To save it for the moment from the effects of its own 
Irresponsibility is merely to protract its living death. 



XVI.] DESTINY OF THE RACE. 425 

Whatever saps the sentiment of its personal Responsi- 
bility poisons the fountains of its existence ; and " chris- 
tian charity " has been practising this poisoning trade 
for many centuries. 

The wealthy classes, and the clergy holding their 
purse-strings, try to purchase a fictitious heaven by a 
fictitious beneficence. The so-called "hard-heartedness 
of the poor toward each other" has always been the pro- 
test of human common-sense against the debasing and 
destructive use of wealth to relieve poverty by anniliilat- 
ing the sentiment of personal Responsibility. The hon- 
est poor know the value of the law " He that will not 
work, neither shall he eat." 

The rich, who need not work, naturally yield to the 
temptation to excuse tlieir own eating, by providing 
food for those who will not work. But the only true 
function of wealth is to provide for and to oversee work ; 
the workers then take care of themselves. 

The sense of Responsibility vitalizes the universe. 
^ Where it is lacking, society falls into anarchy, families 
into decay, and individuals into wretchedness; the 
genius frustrates his own career, the father abuses his 
powers, the mother neglects her offspring, filial piety 
and civic fealty vanish away, and vice and poverty be- 
come the rule instead of the exception. 

The root of all Morality is Responsibility, and its fruit is 
true Religion. Shall Benevolence then set itself to cut 
off the root and spoil the fruit ? The Charity of the 
Future will grasp the idea of watering this root of 
Morality to reap the fruit of Religion. No good is done 
to the vicious poor until they are set with their faces 
heavenward; nor to the shiftless poor until they are 
taught the lessons of a personal independent responsi- 
bility. To inspire them with the wish, the will and 
the knowledge to take care of themselves, and their 
little ones, is the sole business of " christian charity." 

The sentiment of Responsibility will not grow except 
in good society. That does not mean in fashionable 
high life (which is always bad society), nor does it 
mean in intercourse with the rich and notorious, with 
people of leisure and pleasure, statesmen and soldiers, 



426 THE INTELLBCTUAL AND MORAL [LECT. 

popular writers, orators and, artists. It means that 
really good society which is everywhere enjoyed among 
the steady-living and the steady-working masses of man- 
kind, where every social virtue is conscripted into ser- 
vice and disciplined by daily toil and family affection. 

The sense of responsibility cannot be dinned or 
driven into the poor, by preaching and praying, alms- 
giving and commitments to houses of correction. It 
must be instilled and inspired by sympathy, counsel, 
judicious assistance and example. Like love it is not 
bought nor sold. 

Like affectionateness too it is hereditable and trans- 
missible from generation to generation. As the spaniel 
is the type and illustration of the descent of a cultivated 
attachment, so the watch-dog is the type and illustration 
of the stirpal growth of responsibility, under the unin- 
terrupted influence of a habit of superintendence. The 
"family servant" has disappeared, only because the fam- 
ily itself has lost its homestead. It was the homestead — 
not the family — that bred its generations of menial care- 
takers. 

Circumstances — not dictation; the unvarying call for 
comprehended assistance from others — not .any calcula- 
tion of profit or pleasure; these create and foster the 
growth of responsibility — in servants — in masters — in 
every creature. For it is often strongest and steadiest 
where unacknowledged and ill paid ; and it reaches its 
acme of intensity in the heart of the mother of an uncon- 
scious babe, or imbecile child, all hope of reward fore- 
stalled and barred out forever. 

To rouse the dormant sentiment in the irresponsible 
poor, and to sow thereby the seed of it in the constitu- 
tion of their unborn offspring, is the noblest task of be- 
nevolence and the only hope of the future. The task is 
set — the task is undertaken — by the new Organization 
of Charities. 

Organized Charity requires : 1, a perfect census and 
registry of professional beggary ; 2, the subdivision of 
the whole field of beggary into small districts; 3, com- 
plete intercommunication and mutual intelligence be- 
tween each district and the rest ; 4, a resident superin- 



XVI.] DESTINT OF THE EACE. 42T 

tendent, a local corps of visitors, a district house, wliicli 
should be a temporary refuge and place of friendly de- 
tention, as well as an office of observation and informa- 
tion; 5, a close alliance with the municipal police, not 
for the application of force in behalf of charity, but for 
the substitution of force by charity ; 6, a close alliance 
with the medical profession, especially in their municipal 
duty; 7, a close alliance with the trades-people, manu- 
facturers and merchants in each district or neighborhood ; 

8, a close alliance with clergymen, magistrates, trustees 
of benevolent endowments, hospitals and asylums ; and 

9, a perfect understanding with the overseers and jailers 
of houses of detention and correction, prisons and peni- 
tentiaries ; so that, when confirmed vagabonds have re- 
sisted all friendly treatment, and been committed for cor- 
rection, they should be taught perforce cleanly habits and 
industry, and be kept out of the public streets a suffi- 
cient length of time to make a new trial more hopeful. 

The extension of this system, the success of which 
has already appeared in more than one city, to all the 
cities and towns of an empire, is sure to be made ; and 
finally to the whole world. All the old forms of Phi- 
lanthropy as a method for gratifying the pride of pa- 
trons, or appeasing the conscience of wrong-doers in 
anticipation of the Day of Judgment, are destined to a 
slow but sure decay and final extinction. But in all 
ages to come true Pliilanthropy must gratify itself by 
reasonable exercises ; and more and more will it take on 
the aspect of Public Spirit, — that indescribable desire 
which the wise and just man feels to render back the 
benefits which he has received, — to bless future genera- 
tions with the blessing with which past generations 
have blessed him, — to show his love to the Creator of 
his own happiness in the small, by enhancing the happi- 
ness of his fellow-creatures in the large, — to please his 
imagination with pictures of good deeds not limited to 
the short term of his own earthly life, but vicariously 
immortal, like his own soul. 

Out of the sentiment of Responsibility as felt by men in 
their capacity of begetters and providers and by women 
in their capacity of nourishers and nurses, have pro- 



428 THE ESTTELLECTTJAL AND MORAL [LECT. 

ceeded the sentiments of religions veneration for an 
ideal Providence, and religious respect for a God of laTv 
and love. To cultivate religion among the lowest 
classes of mankind by appealing to an intellect in them 
destitute of the first principles of order, or to affections 
in them of which they are both constitutionally and 
habitually deprived, is a mere fatuous tradition of the 
trade of Theology. Rouse in them care-taking for them- 
selves and painstaking for their relatives, and a new light 
of the knowledge of the great Care-taker of all will 
dawn upon them. Teach them to hear the call of famil- 
iar duty and to answer the prayer of husband, wife and 
child, and they learn fast enough to pray. The Organ- 
ization of Charity is therefore destined to be the Reor- 
ganization of Religion. 

As to the Religion of the future I have perhaps said 
in my Tenth Lecture all that it is safe to say. The 
progress of the physical sciences, of the material organ- 
ization of society, and of its mental and artistic train- 
ing, goes on before the eyes of the beholder. But who 
can see those mysterious undercurrents of sentiment 
which are depositing the spiritual strata in the ocean of 
the Time? 

Nothing is so hard to discover as a tendency. It re- 
quired a thousand experiments and most elaborately 
curious machinery to get the curve of a cannon ball 
tlnrough the air, and to show that every — the slightest 
— change of shape in the projectile produced some cor- 
responding change in the trajectory. No soldier knows 
how the corps d'armee v^ith which he fights is manceu- 
vring. If the army be very great, the commanding gen- 
eral himself is often doubtful to which side the battle 
sways. How much less efficient must be the means of 
observation of the philosopher regarding the tendencies 
of his age in spiritual things ? 

It is noteworthy that every religious zealot supposes 
his OMm sect to be on the way to pre-eminence. His 
point of view being necessarily low down, and his hori- 
zon limited to the region in which his own creed is 
professed, he can frame no just comparison between its- 
general acceptability and that of other creeds. His 



XVT.] DESTESTY OF THE RACE. 429 

prophetic liopes are merely ardent wishes. What his 
reason accepts as divine he takes for granted must 
become universal. 

Every priesthood therefore forecasts the Destiny of 
Man in the shape of a Millennium when the work of 
propagating its peculiar dogmatic theology and special 
ritual of worship shall have been completely successful 
in all quarters of the globe. This, however, being 
equally true of the priesthoods of Buddha, of Mahomet 
and of Christ, and of all the divergent sects of each, 
renders the prophecy in each case vain, so far as it 
stands on its own merits as a prophecy of the Propa- 
ganda. There may be other reasons for considering the 
prophecy of success for one religion better than for the 
rest; but no reliance can be placed on the ardent wishes 
and earnest faith which inspire the prophecy in any case. 

To learn the tendency of mankind in matters of faith, 
one must first consider that religious faith is a com- 
pound of morality and metaphysics ; that is, of all that 
men suppose respecting God and his creation, Man's 
nature, and the well-being of Human society. If, then, 
a tendency towards certain stable views respecting one 
or other of these elements of religion can be clearly dis- 
cerned, the whole religious tendency can be at least 
partially suspected. 

If it be true that humankind is becoming more and 
more conscientious, just and temperate in common life, 
there must be a tendency of their religious sentiments 
towards the worship of a truly worthy God. If men 
and women in the mass are growing to be more humane 
and pitiful and mercifuUj^ just towards each other, their 
God is also growing kinder and more loving to theni. 
By combining these two tendencies of human society 
we get as a resultant a direct gravitation towards the 
religion of Jesus of Nazareth ; or, what may express it 
better, to that element which is common to Confutzee- 
ism, Mahometanism and Christianity, embodied in the 
Chinese motto " Thou shalt not do to another what thou 
should' st dislike him to do to thee," and in the Chris- 
tian formula, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with 
all thy heart, and thy neighbor as thyself." 



430 THE INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL [LECT. 

On the intellectual or metaphysical side, the tendency 
of the educated part of the race is directed at present 
by the physical sciences ; and there seems to be no 
counteracting influence except that of mysticism. But 
mysticism is the metaphj^sical philosophy of human 
affections, protesting against the controlling dictation of 
the human understanding. Now if mankind be really 
educating their understanding to a more vigorous treat- 
ment of all the facts of the universe, the result seems 
inevitable, that the affections must be subjugated to 
calmer and juster contemplation of facts. Only that 
residuum of mystical pliilosophy will then remain 
which shall correspond to actual facts — after a thor- 
ough-going investigation of the universe so far as man's 
apparatus of discovery and criticism can reach it. 

There is but one mystical fact outside the pale of scien- 
tific research, viz.,' the fact of intelligent self-existence. 
This of course can never be investigated by any scien- 
tific process, because it is itseK the investigator. It 
knows itself to be ; but how it came to be, it cannot 
know; nor by what means it knows itself to be. Its at- 
tributive powers it can study while embodied in those 
powers ; but when disembodied — it vanishes instantly 
from the field of investigation. It can fancy what it 
pleases about itself, both wlnle embodied and when dis- 
embodied ; but it can understand nothing. In ages when 
the understanding had no physical apparatus, no store of 
already investigated facts to suggest and guide to fresh 
investigation, the fancy was at its highest and most con- 
stant and delightful or unhapjDy exercises : but in this 
age of complete and satisfactory occupation for the hu- 
man understanding, with so much found out and so 
much to find out, man has neither time nor inclination 
for the amusements of fancy outside of the world of 
real life. Huntmg in the forest has been given up as a 
regular occupation by those who have fertile farms and 
comfortable city homes and exacting business. So, in 
the mental world, men see too much flesh and blood to 
care for ghosts; consort delightfully with too many 
saints and sages in the body, to invent invisible angels ; 
and are too much and too successfully dealing with act- 



XVI.] DESTINY OF THE KACE. 431 

ual hells iu a waj of benevolence to take spiritual stock 
in a tlieological hell which no one ever was certainly 
known to go to or come from. 

Medicine has dissipated the fancy of diabolic and an- 
gelic possession ; botany and mineralogy have brushed 
the plush and dew of folk-lore off from human history ; 
chemistry has unmasked magic; geology, geography 
and astronomy have invaded and occupied the fairest 
and wealthiest domains of the mystical imagination ; and 
phj^sics as the science of the invisible world-force has in- 
oculated the human fancy itself with ideas of the unity, 
simplicity and unchangeable regularity of the entire 
realm of existence. 

The tendency therefore to some sort of unitarianism, 
— not only antipolytheistic, and antitritheistic, but 
antitriunitheistic (except in a Sabellian sense) — is 
unmistakable, wherever popular education prevails ; and 
when women are educated equally with men, both sexes 
must share, each according to its several nature, in a de- 
parture from the mysticism of the old prevailing creeds, 
and in a common tendency to make all religious feeling 
and conduct to consist simply iu expressions of confi- 
dence in the providence of one God and of benevolence 
towards all his creatures. Religion will in fact become 
simply Morality and Philanthropy. 

Two words will disappear — Schism and Apostasy — 
in their present religious sense. They will be recog- 
nized, socially, as effete Schimpfw drier ^ "Shame words" 
of two primary human rights — the right of the indi- 
vidual to freely "obey the witness in his own soul," and 
the right of individuals to freely modify all organiza- 
tions of social intercourse according to the necessities of 
inward and outward experience. When it comes to be 
recognized that God is adorable and lovable, but not 
knowable, an authoritative Church will not exist, Schism 
Avill cease to be Dissent, and Apostasy will be nothing 
worse than a woman's change of name at marriage. 
When Theology expurgates the Syllogism from its 
creeds, the human heart can become theological, and the 
distracted brain settle down into rational and peaceful 
mysticism. The personal equation in all the physical 



432 THE INTELLECTUAL AMD MORAL [LECT. 

sciences being established, the personal equation in relig- 
ion will be discovered and believed. If there be Seraphs 
and Cherubs in heaven, there must be both burners and 
shiners on the earth, and these will constitute the only 
two great sects, to one of which women naturally belong 
and into the other men naturally gather themselves. 
But the creed of both will be that unwritten Morality 
which binds the human soul to God, and that unwritten 
Philanthropy which binds all human souls together. 
Thus the Religion of the Future will in fact become 
merely the harmony of Morality and Philanthropy. 

Morality and Philanthropy? 

For the mystic these are cold words. To the Chris- 
tian intelligence they are words burning hot with man's 
gratitude for the past and confidence in the future. 
Words? No, not words — but names, — names for a new 
and future zeal for doing good. " Freely ye have 
received," they say: "Freely give." New names for 
Vital Godliness. Names for that boundless, absolute, 
ecstatic, self-sacrificing Love of the Father, which shone 
on the face of Jesus the Anomted and the Anointer; 
which has illuminated the faces of thousands of saints 
and martyrs who died calling on his name, and claiming 
the performance of his promise that the Truth should 
make them Free, with the glorious liberty of the Sons 
of God. 

The Religion of the future will be Free Religion ; in 
no antinomian sense ; but in the sense assigned to it by 
the Type man ; who went about doing good and preach- 
ing righteousness; healing the sick and casting out 
devils; saying that neither at Jerusalem nor on any 
other templed height God should henceforth be wor- 
shipped ; but that God was a spirit, and should be wor- 
shipped in the human spirit, and with simple, fearless, 
practical, affectionate and independent honesty, inspired 
by a love of personal goodness (holiness), and confident 
of a happy end in the bosom of creative love. All 
creeds must simplify themselves into this creed of Jesus, 
and all mysticism become practical after his example. 

The Destiny of Mankind becomes in this view the 
macrocosm of the destiny of each individual; and as 



XVI.] DESTINY OF THE RACE. 433 

all personal religion resolves itself into the comprehen- 
sion, love and practice of the fundamental principles of 
Christianity as set forth in the life of Jesus, with infi- 
nitely varied applications to the circumstances of per- 
sonal existence, — so the religions of the human race 
must, in the course of ages, be reduced to the simplicity 
of the fundamental : Be God's child and Man's brother. 
No creed can stand the fire of modern and future sci- 
ence. All ceremonials must become merely symbolic. 
The relationship of clergy to laity will resolve itself into 
that of leadership to following, in purity of character 
and wise beneficence ; and no rewards in heaven or pun- 
ishments in hell will be either desired or anticipated; 
for Christ will have indeed come the second time to rule 
and bless the world. 



i:n^dex. 



A, B, CD, 252 

A in Armeniau, 233 

A forms, 240 

A arrowhead, 239 

A, AA, plumes, 228 

AA, of astouisliment, 236 

Abarls, 239 

Abbeville gravels, 55 

Abbeville. 188 

Abbot (Gen.), 142 

Abrahamic mi deration, 14-i 

Abrabam, etymology, 170 

Abraham's footprints, 186 

Absenteeism, 364: 

Aby<los,147 

Acari, 161 

Adam, 43 

Adams, 259 

Adam and Eve le.2.'eiid,117 

Adam's Peak, 222 

Adam's footprints, 186 

Adamio innocenee, 133 

Adjustment of i^roperty, 

308 
Admiral y charts, 333 
Adonai. Adonis, 282 
Adoption of children, 257 
Adultery, 316 
Advertising mediums, 386 
Jiaeas, 10 

^rolite worshipped, 27 
Msop, 69 
Agameminon, 356 
Agassiz,2, 11,49, 132,199 
Agassiz's views, 76 
Agassiz's fish, 86 
Age of the earth, 46 
Agglutination, 179 
Agni hymns, 289 
Agriculture, 349 
Aladdin's palace, 47 
Alchemy, 334 
Alf = bull,. 231 
Alfa, A, 231 
Alphaios, 231 
Alfred (Kingi, 151 
Alp = arm, 230 
Alphabet, 214 
Alphabets named, 251 
Altar = mountain, 226 
Altar with wedge, 239 
Alternate generation. 111 
Am, gem, 278 
Amadis de tiaul, 271 
Amber collection, 85 
Amber in trade, 278 
Amenamau, 149 
Araenophis, 154 
Amiens gravel, 58 
Amn, Jove, 278 
Amosis, 154 
Amten's tomb, 196 
Amulet weapons, 263 
Analysis, 82 
Anatomy, 352 
Anastasi papyrus, 149 
Ancestor worship, 191, 

255 



Anderson (Capt.), 3 

Animals with lake dwell- 
ers, 129 

Animals of the pyramid 
age, 155 

Animals in and out of 
grottos, 262 

Animal speech. 400 

Ann Arbor, 417 

Antelope in caves, 53 

Anthracite, 337 

Authroiioniorphism, 283 

Aniiochia, 144 

Antiquity of man, 43 

Antictuity of Egyptian art, 
105 

Antiquarianism as a study, 
355 

Antiquit^s celtiques, 57 

Antiquaries, 355 

Antiquarianism, 357 

Anubis, 129, 156, 194, 196 

Apamea, Ararat, 222 

Apappus, 154 

Apesi<and men, 119 

Apollo, 400 

Apostasy, 431 

Apportioning districts, 394 

Apuru, 149 

Arab sheik, 35, 36 

Arboriculture, 349 

Ararat, picture, 217, 221 

Archseology, 356 

Archibald, 322 

Architect, poet, 215 

Architecture, 183 

Architecture, modern, 189 

Architecture, ancient, 190 

Architecture, the building 
of arks, 218 

Architecture of the fut- 
ure, 410 

Architrave, 211 

Archives, in ark, 229 

Arctinus, first poet, 215 

Argos, 217 

Arimaspians, 10 

Arithmetic, 23 

Arithmetic with savages, 
34,35 

Aristocracy, 396 

Aristotle, 9 

Arkof Gen. x.,10, 144 

Ark of the covenant, 226 

Arkite poetry, 215 

Aries, 218 

Arm, mountain, 230, 234 

Armenian A, explained by 
Jesus, 233, 237 

Armeuian language, 159 

Arn, ark, 226 

Arretino, 34 

Arrowhead, 239 

Arthur (King), 151 

Arve, 6 

Arx, citadel, 229 

Artist and lion, 68 

Artistic genius, 184 



Assyrian letters, 238 
Assyrian, style, = Ionic, 

122 
Astronomy in the future, 

321 
Astrology, 30 
Athos, island mountain,. 

242 
Atropos, 301 
Aum, 277 

Aurignac grotto, 261 
Aurochs in caves, 53, 12^ 
Avaris, 148 

Baal-Adonis worship, 283- 

Baalbec, 410 

Babel, 10, 164, 410 

Bache, 6, 39 

Bachman, 107 

Back writing, 237 

Bacon, 22 

Badness, 311 

Baiae, 63 

Balfour, 143 

Banorolt, 208 

Bara, to create, 215 

Barbar, pyramid. 224 

Bard, As, Egyp., 215 

Bardic element in lan- 
guage, 174 

Baring. 174 

Barkal mountain, 273 

Barr, 39 

Barter, 382 

Basalt theory of architect- 
ure, 210 

Basques, Esquimaux, 113 
175 

Bear picture on pebble» 
268 

Beauty, 201 

Beech and oak ages, 131 

Beggars, 422 

Belgrade forest, 143 

Belle-air skull type, 118 

Belles-lettres, 402 

Belzoni, 218 

Benevolence, 423 

Beni Hassan, 148 

Berber race, 114, 266 

Berenice, 150 

Berkeley, 72 

Berlin survey, 347 

Berserkers, 133 

Berzelius, 11, 299 

Berzil, iron, 171 

Bessemer iron, 341 

Biban el Molouk, 194 

Bierstadt, 208 

Bilingual inscriptions, 235 

Bimanum, 88 

Biography, 13 

Bird's head picture, 26? 

Bird-track scrip, 248 

Bize caves, 53 

Blacks cheated, 123 

Black Jews, 104, 107 

Black race, 95 



436 



I^"DEX. 



Blacksmiths, 340 
Blackstone, 11 
Blake, 134 
Blaniord, 3^2 
Blazius, 327 
Blasphemy, 317 
Blast fiunaces, 337 
Blodget, 327 
Blumenbach's himanum, 

88 
Boaz, 225 
Bog, devil, 279 
Bogs of Denmark, 131 
Bog relics, 128 
Boue caves, 53 
Bonheiir, 2 
BoiiivHrrl, 152 
Books, 402 
Bopp, 169 
Borden, 39 
Bosvfell, 13 
Botany in future, 347 
Botanical gardens, 349 
Bothnia, 64 
Boucher de Perthes, 57, 

185 
Boulaq museum, 196 
Bourgeois, Gi, 136 
Bourges pyramid, 38 
Boustrepliodou, 236 
Bow-wow theory, 169 
Bozzel, 215 
Brachycephs, 268 
Brahma, 27S 
Brain of man, 91 
BrixliaiTi cave, 53, 58 
Broca's boueg, 90 
Broca's measurements, 

103 
Broca on cave-men, 267 
Bronze age language, 175 
Bioun, 322 
Brown race, 114 
Brown (.lohu). 271 
Brown of f>t. .Seuvin, 341 
Brown (H K.), 409 
Bruce, 218 
Brugsch, 148. 266 
Bucklaud, 52, 58 
Buckle, 255 
Build, make. 215 
Bunnet 138 
Bunseu's Egypt, 34 
Bunsen'splio etics, 234 
BuonarotU, 405 
Burial for safety, 199 
Burke (E), 175 " 
lUirue's travels, 222 
Burton, 39 
Busk, 107, 132 
Buteaux, 60 
Byron's couplet, 152 
Byzantium, 301 

Cabala, 274 
Oabiri, 188 
Cadmus, 10, 152, 246 
Oadmean letters, 238 
Caen cathedral, 220 
Cain legend, 117 
Cattres, 142 
Calamites, 51 
Callirrhoe, 144 
Cambridge, 417 
Cambyses, 191 
Camel unknown to the 

pyramids, 155 
Campbell (J. F.), 64 
Campbell's ledge, 207 
Camper, 107 
Canal mania, 337 
Canals, 387 
Canne, 169 



Canoes in bogs, 130 

CaunibaUsm, 130, 268 

Caoutcliouc, 350 

Caph, the hand, 229 

Capital = Capitol, 221, 229 

Capital and interest, 379 

Cardium edule, 132 

Carloman. 275 

Carlyle, 175 

Carnak, 190 

Cartouche, ark, 226 

Caspar Hauser, 96 

Case (Chief Justice). 288 

Cases iu Egyptian, 180 

Cat absent" from pilotis, 
129 

Cat unknown in Egypt, 155 

Cataclysms. 137 

Catechism, 307 

Cathedral, 203 

Cattle-breeding, 350 

Cave bear, 264. 267 

Cave relics, 52 

Cave sculptures, 185 

Cave theory in architect- 
ure, 209 

Caves in Brazil, 65 

Cella of temple, 209 

Cells, 114 

Celsius, 64 

Centaurs, 247 

Cephalization, 90 

Cerberus, 194 

Ceremonial, 255 

Chambers, 76, 322 

ChampoUion, 155, 248 

Chandra, 144 

Chaos, 10 

Character of savages, 201 

Charcoal burning, 352 

Charity, 424 

Chase (P. E.), 35 

Chateau de Gallion, 47 

Chavannes piloti, 128 

Chemi(-al geology, 5 

Chemistry of the future, 
334 

Cheops, 154 

Child adoption, 257 

Chillon, 152 

Chimpanzee, 119 

Chinese language, 179. 243 

Chinese not originally 
monosylliibic, 181 

Chinese radicals. 251 

Chinese scrip, 237, 249 

Chinese ti'niplu. 219 

Choate's writiir-C. 233 

Chokier c.ive, 54 

Christ of Diirnecker, 93 

Christian charit^', 424 

Chrlstol, an. d. ch., 53 

Chri-sty, 53 

Christianity, 19 

Christianity ancestor wor- 
ship, 270 

Chroiiok),'V of Esvpt, 36 

Chur'h, 2."203, 411 

CiL-ero, 253 

Circle of stones, 215 

Citi5 antique, 266 

City ver.-;u3 country. 396 

Civilization, 122, 201 

Civilization and iron, 342 

Clan hfe, 253 

Cyclic poets, 215 

Cyclopean remains, 218 

classification of sciences, 7 

Classiflcationoi languages, 
160 

Classification of nature by 
Chinese, 244 

Cleft rocks, 273 



Clemvmt (Dr.), 268 

Cleopatra's barge, 372 

Climate of the future, 323 

Clotho, 301 

Clubs, 369 

Coal, glacial, 51 

Coal and iron, 336 

Cochom(5 pyramid, 154 

Coeducation of sexes, 413 

Coinage debased, 383 

Columbaria, 197 

Column-mountain. 227 

Columns in pairs, 225 

Comets dreadful, 33 

Comfort in life, 372 

Commerce in the future, 
384 

Commercial navy of Eng- 
land, 387 

Committees. 369 

Common Law, 391 

Comparative Philology, 
159 

Complex relationships.204 

Compound words iu Chi- 
nese, 181 

Compulsory education,413 

Conate, 72, 165 

Cone of the Tiniere, 64 

Congresses, 369 

Conjecture versus knowl- 
edge, 22 

Conjunction of planets, 36 

Conscience of Ijeasts, 92 

Constantinople, 360 

Constitutional provisos, 
393 

Construction, 206 

Consultation, 367 

Contour curves, 331 

Contractor's pole, 123 

Convenience, 313 

Conversation, 70 

Coop, cup. cap, 229 

Coptos, 150 

Coral reef man, 65 

Cornell, 417 

Cosaguina, 331 

Cost of manual labor, 377 

Cottage theory of archi- 
tecture, 211 

Cow's rock, 187 

Crass us, 144 

Cratylus, 169 

Crawford, 131, 155 

Cretaceous age, 49 

Creuzot, 341 

Crinolds, 85 

Criticism, 357 

CroU's theorv, 37, 325 

Cromlechs, 190 

Crosse's experiments. 161 

Crystal In sea, 298 

Cuneiform. 239. 242 

Cupola, ark, 226 

Cuvier. 58 

Cyclopean. 190. 215 

Cypress forest. 64 

Cyreua iluminalis, 59 

Cyrus, 14, 152 

D. tor. mountain, 242 

D'Archiac. 60 

DaliaR. DeBiR (Hebrew), 

275 
Dagger handle, 260 
Damascus. 142 
Daua, 6. 90 
Danuecker, 93 
Daniels, 218 
Darwin, 6, 76 
Date of letters, 247 
David the poet, 287 



INDEX. 



437 



David (L. 1,405 

Davis, IGl) 

Day = 1000 years, 50 

Dead laiinnaiji'P, 176 

Deaiie(Dr.i, 187 

Dea^i, 84, KO'J 

J>eb:iscd I'oiuage, 383 

D3BB:i.um:.iir,"4l.58 

DeCoiila..ges.2ri7,;iCG 

Deep-river tish, 51 

!)eer-fiilliiiy:. liGO 

Deism, 'ATO 

De Gobiueau, 115, 184= 

Delegation by election, 

393 
Delphian chnsm, 273 
Delos, 218. o5G 
Deltas, 140 
Delta, lutier. 242 
Deluge impossible, 137, 

266 
Demavend, 222 
De Merc. y. GO 
Demiurge, 24. 50 
D'u-mauritus. 4."iG 
Denise lava man, 61 
Denudation. 48 
Descartes, 11 
Desert belt, 142 
DesortE ). 2. 64, 114 
Desor palafiites. 129 
Desor on the i'.erliers, 266 
De Soto's horse, 70 
Destiny, 295 
Destination, COO 
Deucalion, ]u 
Developnic! t, 73 
De Venieiiil, 253 
D.!VO!iia,!i a-:e, 48 
Dhorhamides, 186 
Dialects, 232 
Dialects or ideas. 399 
Diamond diiU, 345 
Diana. 217 
Dickens. 15 
Ditiuity ot man, 68 
Dii geiitiles, 258 
Dijon, 372 
Diluvium, 57 
Diluvial man, 55 
Dish in bog, 128 
Dissentisf-cuU, 118 
Dividend and interest, 381 
Dog of early man, 129 
Dolichocepiis. 268 
Dollar's worth, 382 
Dolmens, 53 
Dolmens of the Sahara, 

218 
Dome, mountain, 226 
Dor, arm, 130 
Dordogne cavfis, 1S5 
Doric style, 227 
Dorus, 10 

Dovetailed door, 127 
Dowler, 65 
Dragon scrip. 246 
Drift, 57,323 
Druidmcjunds,53,174, 274 
Dryads, 274 
Duality, 220, 222 
Dubois, GO 
Dumas, 11 
Duplication, 224 
Dupont. 121, 265 
Dynasties, ligypt, 146 

Early social life, 122 
Earthquake tides, 6 
Eclipse of Thales, 37 
Economics, 371 
Eden myth. 133 
Education, 304, 411 



Egyptian relics, 66 
Egyptian chronology, 154 
Egyptian language, 158, 

177 
Egyptian propylon, 219 
Egyptian letter S. 241 
Egyptian symbols. 250 
Egyptian tiimbs, 256 
Electi(,jrs, 393 
Elephant, 231, 155 
Elephant head on bone, 

258 
Elevation of lands, 51 
Elevation of sea level. 51 
Elevation ot Norway, 64 
Eleven-venr cycle, 32 
Elijah, 407 
Elisha's axe, 340 
Eliot, 322 
Elves, 231 
Elysmm, 269 
Emanations. 237 
Emerson, 208, 255 
Enchavted ground. 45 
Endowments, 420 
Engihoul cave, 54 
Engis scull, 54,121 
English language, 401 
■ Entail, 36G 
Entef, 154 
Enthusiasm. 2 
Entominnent, 199 
Environment, i:'jS 
Envy, 317 
Ephe.sus, 27 
Ejihesiau silversmiths, 

224 
Epic cycle. 216 
Erdmunn, 7 
Ereck(ark). 144 
Erie canal. 387 
Er(jsion, 48 
Erosion since the bone 

beds, 59 
Erosion at Marseilles, 333 
Esquimaux, 135 
Esquimaux in France, 113 
Espy, 2 

Eternal mansion, 269 
Ethnologv, 359 
Euclid, 19, 40, 69 
Eusebius, 358 
Evans (J.), 60. 169 
Evaporation, 325 
Excavations, 356 
Existence, 430 
Experiment, 22 
Expression, 399 

Facere, 215 
Fact, fiction, 407 
Failure, 297 
Falconer, 53, 59, 258 
Fame, 302,404 
Family, 94 

Family lite in tombs, 193 
Fancy in science, 22 
Fancy of the ancients, 228 
Faraday, 3 
Fatalism, 303 
Fate, 301 

Fauna successive, 49 
Faust, 276 
Feasts funereal, 2G2 
Feather, phirae, 234 
Ferry (M.), 417 
Fetlchism, 270 
Figurative writing, 245 
Fine arts, 405 
Finger-rings, 372 
Finance, 373 

Fire in many languages, 
182 



Fish-gambol scrip, 248 
Flint hatchets, 53 
Flint forgeries. CO 
Flood revolutions. 140 
Flora successive, 49 
Florida blacks, 123 
Flower, CO 

Flutes in columns, 227 
Fohi-cadmus, 246 
Font of baptism, 227 
Food of lake dwellers, 127 
Food of llalric men, 130 
Footprints, 186 
Forbes, 14 
Forces defined, S 
Forged tiints, GO 
Formations, 47 
Form-fcivee. <). 102 
Forest tb'.ry ot architect- 
ure, 213 
Forests .saved, 350 
Forests and rnin. 142 
Forster's book. 151 
Fossil strata, 62 
Fo.<sil forms, 347 
Four types, 77 
Free niasourv, 369 
Free religion', 432 
French map of pop., 112 
French dialects, 160 
Friar J! icon, 276 
Funerary grot, 261 

Galitzin. 109 
Gauges V.i.liey. C4 
Garrigon's jiebble, 263 
Garrison. 12 
Gaudaiu:!.. 186 
Gaudry. GO 
Gaiissen, 276 
Geikie, 14 

Gem superstition, 271 
Genesis. 43 
Genius, 165. 404 
Geodesy, 332 
Geography, 38, 331 
Geology, 4, 343 
Geological series, 46 
Geometry, 23 
Gerrymandering, 394 
Gibberish. 276 
Gibbon, 16 
Gibraltar relics, 60 
Giralle, l.''i5 
Giralda. 152 
Girard , 1 1 
Glacial age, 37. 64 
Glacial coal, 51 
Glacial scratches, 203 
Glacier of the Aar, 2 
Glaciers, old. 323 
Glaciei s. I'ermian, 326 
Glass bay, 51 
Glass superstition, 271 
Glidden, 31 

Gnosticism, 21. 27, 233 
Goat in caves, 53 
Goethe, 15 
Gobble, 270 
God defined, 280 
Godilne.'^s, 432 
Godwin (Austen), 53 
Gotfoi]r:ii.ie,54 
Gold, 345. 384 
Goodness, 306 
Gorilla's thumb, 89 
Gothic stvle, 203 
Gracchi, 151 
Grandison. 178 
Graham (C), 142 
Grant, 11,39 
Gratiolet. 91, 107 
Gravel beds, 97 



438 



INDEX. 



Greensand age, 48 
Greg's Creed of C, 281 
Grev (Asa), 7G 
Grimm's law, 171, 178, 230 
Grotto, Aurigniic, 261 
Growth force, 8 
Gulf of Bothnia, 64 
G-william, 252 

Haa = 100.000,000, 234 

Habitat, 84 

Habitat produces variety, 
122 

Hades, 269 

Hadrian's tomb, 191 

Haidinger, 28 

Haldemau, 169 

Halicarnassus. 190 

Hall (Jas.), 208 

Hamamat, 149 

Ham-ham. 278 

Hamilton, 165 

Hail dynasty, 247 

Hand, caji, cup. 229 

Hand-print, 187 

Hand-print iu many lan- 
guages, 182 

Hare (R.), 09 

Hare not in pilotis, 129 

Harmony, 201 

Hassler. 39 

Hatasu,154 

Haupt, 208 

Hauran, 142 

Hay den, 35 

Hazel-nuis,128 

Head in many languages, 
182 

Heaven, 270 

Hubert, 60 

Hebrew patriarchs. 144 

Hebrew language, 158 

Hebrew etymologies, 170 

Hebrew letters, 237 

Hebron, 148 

Heer(0.1,51, 64 

Hegel, 72, 255 

Helen, 9 

Hell. SOD, 322 

Henderson. 65 

Hengsteiiberg, 276 

Hennessey, 323 

Henry, 32'7, 330 

Herculaneum, 87 

Heredity, 426 

Herodotus, 9 

Hierarchy, voting, 394 

Hieroglyphics, 245 

Hildreth,208, 288 

Hindu pagoda, 219 

Hinckley (T.j,2 

History, 355 

Historical travellers, 14 

Hissarlik, 356 

Hitchcock, 187 

Hi-thseu, 244 

Hoai-nan-tseu, 247 

Hoang-ti, 247 

Hoang ho, 139 

Hohberg skull, 118 

Holiness. 432 

Hooiaioai, 170 

Horoscope wanted, 29 

Horse unknown, 155 

Horseshoe fetich. 272 

Horse picture, 259 

Host, wafer. 276 

Hottentot's bones, 90 

Hottentots, 142 

Hugel-graber, 268 

Hugo (V.), 15 



Hui, 149 

Human bones stratified, 53 
Human hand. 187 
Humboldt (W.), 165 
Humboldt, glacier, 135 
Humphreys (Gen.), 142 
Himt (W.), 409 
Hunter, 53. 322 
Huronian rocks, 48 
Huschke. 107 
Huxley, 76, 89 
Hydra, 247 
Hyena, cave, 53 
Hyksos, 31. 146, 155, 283 
Hygiene. 352 
Hypostasis, 238 

Icswaca, 144, 217 
Idealism in arch., 222 
Idioms, 397 
Ildefonso, 65 
Imagis of the dead, 199 
Imitation words. 165 
Immortality. 198, 264,269 
Imposts, 374 
Incredibility, 153 
Indian languages, 176 
Indolence of despair, 123 
Indraism. 254 
Indra hymns, 289 
Infinite, number, 234 
Infinite, a modern idea.281 
Inflected languages, 179 
Inscription. Lycopolis. 152 
Inscription at Zerbhokhia, 

280 
Interjection words, 165 
Intellectual destiny, 397 
Interest and principal, 378 
Interest and dividend, 381 
Interments, 268 
Inundations, 138 
Invented words, 166 
Invented by priests, 174 
Ionic = Assyrian, 212 
Irish A, 241 
Irish writing, 184 
Irish of Meath, 104 
Irish Crannogs, 128 
Iron production, 337 
Irresponsibility, 424 
Irrigation, 349 
Isaac, etym., 170 
Isaac and Esau myth, 144 
Isaac and Jacob myth, 284 
Ishmael's footprints, 186 

Jachin, 228 
Jacob myth, 284 
Jain temples, 209 
Jamblicus. 13 
Jaw of man and ape, 89 
Jehovah, 151, 277, 282 
Jesus, on A, 15, 232 
Jesus teaching, 270 
Jesus redivivus, 305 
Jesus' benevolence, 424 
Jewels, 343 
Jewish theology, 45 
Jewish race, 145 
Jewish progress, 285 
Joan d'Arc, 408 
Job, 287 
Josephus, 151 
Joshua, 284 
Jxidah, 144 
Judge, Sim, 215 
Jukes, 83 
Jumieges, 47, 220 
Jupiter Serapis, 63 
Justice, 392 



Justinopolis, 144 

Kaabah, 229 
Kahlgrcn. 169 
Kalahari. 142 
Kane, 131, 135, 136 
Kant, 165 
Katena. 149 
Kaulbach. 405 
Kauitzir. 149 
Keuiaman. 149 
Kent's hole, 53, 58 
Kepler, 36 

Kho-teau script. 347 ^ 
Khu-n-ateii. 154, 282 
Ki-willow. 246 
Kibotos. Ararat. 222 
Kingsborough, 218 
Kingston clain, 207 
Kirk. 143" 
Kirkir, 215 
Kismet, 303 
Kitchen trash, 132 
Knox's views. 106 
Kol, logos, 237 
Kooner mountain, 222 
Kou-weii ideographs, 248 
Kraitsi'-'s system, 162, 

167. 173 
Kuyun>ik. 356 

Lac, gala, 237 
Lachesis, 301 
Lady queen, 289 
Lake dwellings, 125 
Lamarck, 76 
Lamb on alphabet, 234 
LamellJB flint, 263 
Landlordism 366 
Landscapes, 206, 406 
Langley's balance, 344 
Lan.guage, 158, 397 
Language constitutional, 

165 
Language no test of race, 

177 
Language of priests, 174, 

178 
Language of beasts, 92 
Lapithae, 47 
Laplace, 37 
Laplanders, 129 
Lartet, 60, 66, 258 
Lartet, researches, 262 
Larch-planting, 351 
Lassen, 218 
Latin and Greek, 399 
Laurentian age, 48 
Lausanne, 66 
Lavaiman of Denise, 61 
Lavoisier, 58 
Law and legislation, 391 
Lawgivers, 391 
Layard's sheik, 35. 218 
Lavard's altar and wedge, 

239 
Legacies to colleges, 419 
Legal tender, 383 
Legends of the Jews, 48 
Legislation, 391 
Leibnitz. 11 
Lempriere. 215 
Le Page. 408 
Le Puy man, 87 
Lipsius' Denk., 193 
Letters upside down, 237 
Letters arose from the 

sea, 246 
Letters in China, 249 
Leverrier, 132 
Llebig, 3 



INDEX. 



439 



JA^ge caves, 54 
Life of Jfsus, 15 
LifeinoldKsyptl5G 
Life In a word, 277 
Lily-ark, 226 
Lincoln, 16 
Linguistics, 175 
Linnaeus. 53, 88 
Linnean S<>c. Lane, 187 
Linant IJey, C5 
Linth (E. von d.), 114 
Listen, 245 
Literature, 176 
Livingstone, 39, 143 
Locke, 165 
Lockyer. 323 
Loaaii (W. E.), 208 
Longfellow, 208 
Lontjr-head race, 260 
Lopi's bonk of Itin., 246 
Lossen, 347 
Lotophagi, 10 
Lot's wife. 10, 273 
Louisville. 85 
Love and knowledge, 2 
Love, God of love, 280 
Lubbock. 132, 134, 155 
Luese, 107 
Lucian, 257 
Lumber trade, 351 
Luxiiry. interest, 379 
Lycapolis inscrip , 152 
Lycurgus, 14 
Lyell,4, 46.52, 56, 208 
Lvell. list of strata, 62 
Lying, 317 
Lyon's cabinet, 85 

M forms, 241 
Ma, truth, 228, 278 
Macaulay, 14 
Machine power, 338 
Machinery, 371 
Madeleine remains, 258 
Blffisogothic A, 241 
^lain, Mini, 242 
M line's An. Law, 97 
Magdesprung, 186 
Magical powers, 270 
Magic square, 275 
Magnetic needle, 40 
Mokolo do not bury, 192 
Makrobioi. 10 
Malta story. 206 
Mammoth, 53. 259 
Man, migratory, 86 
Man the worker, 122 
Man-breeding, 350 
Man in the future, 352 
Manes worship, 264 
Manetho's list, 146 
Mann, 39 

Manufactures, 371 
Maps, 38, 332 
Maps of China, 40 • 
Maps of France, 112 
Maps of the future, 331 
Marcosians, 233 
Mariette, 31, 192, 130, 145 
Markham, 136 
Margaret, 372 
Marmorium, 357 
Marriage, 380 
Marseilles map, 333 
Marshall, 11 
Martins, 114 
Mas, Massu, 150 
Mas, child, 170 
Masius mount, 222 
Mass, Romish, 276 
Massagetes, 10 
Massinissa, 191 



Mason and Dixon, 39 

Mater dolorosa, 370 

Matliemiatics, 23 

Matres lectionis, 246 

Matter and spirit. 24 

Mauritius, 322 

Mausolea, 190 

Max Mliller, 420 

Mazai police. 150 

McCuUoch. 208 

McEnery. 53. 58 

Mechanics, 377 

Medicine. 352 

Meigs, 107 

Melanian race, 115 

Melearth,406 

Meldrum, 322 

Memuon, 216. 274 

Memphis, 40, 192 

Menche court, 56 

Menes. 154,155 

Menephtha. 150 

Mentuhntep, 154 

Menu, 256 

Meru. 222 

Metallurgy, 336 

Metaphysics, 8 

Meteorology, 41, 323 

Metempsychosis, 257 

Mexican Gulf, 333 

Michael Angelo. 34, 188 

Micah's words, 288 

Michelet. 14 

Microscope, ancient, 239 

Migrations, 41, 139, 143 

Mill, 165 

Miller's views 80 

Millenium. 309 

Milman. 281 

Mim, Amim, 278 

Mineralogy. 334 

Ming dynasty, 191 

Miracles, 300 

Mithraism. 254 

Mixture of races, 98 

Moirai, 301 

Mokatteb, 151 

Molly, Polly, 230 

Monawhy, 393 

Monboddo. 76 

Mongol faces, 97 

Monopoly, 364 

Monosyllabic, 179 

Monotheism, 284 

Money, 381 

Moon worship, 31 

Moosseedorf, 12? 

Morals. 392, 397 

Morality, 425 

Morier, 221 

Morlot, 132 

Mortillet, 259 

Morton, 92 

Mosaic cosmogony, 45, 50 

Moses, 150. 407 

Moses and the monu- 
ments, 148 

Mosque of Omar, 218 

Moulin (Juignon, 60 

Mountains rising, 333 

Muir, 289 

Mulattoes. 112 

Miiller, 110, 165, 169, 171, 
291,420 

Multitude, 83 

Murchison. 4, 142 

Murder, 316 

Murgab desert, 152 

Murillo, 407 

Musqultoes, 85 

Mycense, 356 

Mythology, 358 



Name fetich, 275 
Names, savage, precise, 69 
Napoleon, 11 
Narrow science, 71 
Natchez pelvis, 61 
Nature, 408 
Nature in fate, 304 
Natural, supernatural, 8 
Natural historv, 347 
Nave, navis, 220 
Neanderthal skull, 60,118, 

126 
Nebular hypothesis, 25, 73 
Negroes, 107 
Neolithic, 67 
Neptune, 217 
Neville pilotis. 128 
New red age, 48 
New Orleans, 65 
New Zealand claciers, 64 
Newspapers, 359 
Newton. 11 
N'ham, to save, 230 
Nicaragua. 331 
Niebuhr, 14 
Nillson, 132 
Ninirod, 10 
Niobe, 10, 216 
Nismes, 53 
Nitocris, 154 
Nevers, 231 
Noah myth. 217, 285 
Noah fish god, 278 
Nobility of ancestors, 191 
Nofre liotep, 154 
Noorgill mtn., 222 
Northampton, 417 
Norton. 233 

Norwegian churches, 219 
Notre Dame de Paris, 220 
Nott and Gliddon, 65 
Nuclei flints, 263 
Nuk-pu-nuk, 282 
Numerals, Egypt, 35 

Oak age, 131 
Obelisk, techen, 225 
Oberli'i Colle<re, 417 
Obi fetich, 278 
Obscuritv, 246 
Observation, 70 
O'Callighan, 128 
Offerings to manes, 257 
Ogham script, 184 
Oil wells, 272 
Old man rock, 273 
Ole Bull, 109 
Olim, formerly, 231 
01m, eternity, 231 
Olympia, 356 
Olympos, 230 
Om, 277 
Omphalos, 278 
Onomatopoeia, 166 
Optimism, 295 
Oratory, fine art, 2 
Organization, 369 
Organization of charity, 

424 
Oriental trade, 386 
Origin of language, 163 
Origin of architecture, 183 
Origin of the alphabet, 

214 
Origin of Chinese, 243 
Original sin, 310 
Osborne, 135 
Osiris, 194, 196 
Osortasen, 154 
Otter picture, 259 
Ottoman sultans, 31 
Owen, 11, 90 



440 



INDEX. 



Ownership, 3G3 
Oxford, 417. 420 
Ox picture, 259 
Oyster, 132 

Psestum, 212 
Pagodas, 218 
Painting 406 
Palaeolithic, 67, 266 
Palreontology, 4 
Palseozoio age, 48 
Palafittes. 125 
Palestine survey, 356 
Palev, 165 
Pantheism, 292 
Pad, 244 

Papal coinage, 383 
Papyri, 149 
Paracelsus, 299 
Parliamentary, 393 
Parenthesis, 398 
Patois, 397 

Patriarchs' tombs, 192 
Patriarchal history, 144 
Patterson, 333 
Paul at Malta, 206 
Pauthier, 236, 244, 250 
Peabody (Geo.), 421 
Pebble cut for a bear, 268 
Pediment, 212, 226 
Pei-ho, 139 
Peirce, 11 
Pekin, 139 
Pelasgus, 10 
Pelops,216 
Peloponnesus, 217 
Pennsyl''ania, 09, 109 
PenoDscoi knob, 206 ■ 
Perftction, 307 
Permian age, 49 
Personal equation, 432 
Pessimism, 295 
Pestilence, 143 
Petroleum. 345 
Phallus, 188 
Pharaohtists, 146 
Phidias, 202, 406 
Philadelphia, 98 
PhilfB cleft rock, 273 
Philanthropy, 421, 424 
Phillips, 203 
Philology, 159 
Phonetics, 248 
Photography, 409 
Phratria, 258 
Physics, 8, 330 
Physical sciences, 20, 21 
Physical geography, 38 
Physical destiny of man, 

306,321 
Physiologv, 352 
Pictet, 137 

Pi(!tures in tombs, 193 
Pictures innumerable, 408 
Pictures on rocks, 187 
Pictures on schist, 259 
Pilgrim's Progress, 44, 271 
Pilciti villages, 125 
Pine age, 351 
Pinebsa. 149 
Plan of creation, 72 
Plant beds, 51 
Planting in India, 143 
Planet \vorship, 32 
Plath, 181 
Plato, 9, 11 
Plotinus, 255 
Plumes of Ma, 228 
Plutarch, 13 
Pococke, 169 
Poet, architect, 215 
Poey, 322 



Poitiers, 186 
Poitou caves, 136, 178 
Politeness, rite.a, 248 
Polyandry, 363 
Polygnotus. 405 
Pompeii, 87 
Pondres cave, 53 
Pontifex, 215 
Poohpooh theory, 169 
Popocatapetl. 273 
Population of Pa., 99, 109 
Population of France, 

map, 112 
Porches of churches, 210 
Porphvry, 358 
Porter (t.). 187 
Porticos, 210 
Possible, 295 
Posture in letters, 237 
Post-tertiary man, 61 
Post-pleiooene age, 49 
Potsdam Fandstone, 78 
Potato. 350 
Pott, 169, 172 
Pouchet(G.),60 
Poughkeepsie, 417 
Poultry unknoven, 155 
Pourtalis, 65 
Power in coal, 338 
Praxiteles, 202,406 
Prav, brav. etc., 276 
Prayer, 300 
Precious metals, 384 
Pre-Raphaelism, 200 
Prescott, 14 
Prestwich. 53, 56, 59 
Prices, real and false, 376 
Prices imsettled, 386 
Priest language, 178 
Priestley, 334 
Primates, 88 

Printing keeps words, 176 
Pritchard. 104 
Proclus. 216 
Professors, 420 
Property, 319, 362 
Property rights, 368 
Proportion, 201 
Propriety, 312 
Propylon, 219 
Prospero, 270 
Protection, tariff, 375 
Protestantism., 256 
Proto-Doric, 210,212, 227 
Providence, 428 
Pruner bey, 108, 118 
Ptolemy's map, 38 
Public spirit, 427 
Pumpelly, 134, 140 
Pulpit, ark, 227 
Pygmies. 10 
Pyramid age, 155 
Pyramid of Gizeh, Cheops, 

39, 218 
Pyramid, construction, 

idea, 199, 240 
Pyramid, bar bar, 224 
Pyrenees, forest, 142 
Pyrrha, 10 
Pythagoras, 11, 13 
Pythagoras, numbers, 275 

Quadrumana, 88 • 

Quaine-clubbo, 64 
Quatrefages, 60, 106 
Question, 245 

Kabbi in Berlin, 275 
Race, 94 

Kace not tested by lan- 
guage, 178 
Radicals, Chinese, 251 



Railroads, 340, 387 

Rain, 143 

Ramsay. 56 

Ramses, 149. 150 

Rasselas. 93 

Rawlinson, 34 

Reade, 15 

Reading Railroad, 346 

Realism, 407 

R6clns. 107 

Redclavs. 59 

RedcUffe, 143 

Relhengriiber. 268 

Reindeer, 53. 130. 259 

Reindeer cave, 267, 325 

Reiset, 107 

Relationship, 204 

Religions, 253 

Religions of the future, 

428 
Remusat. 181 
Renan, 130, 147, 169, 193, 

197 
Renevier, 66 
Republics, 393 
Responsibility, 424 
Revolutions, 140 
Rhine, 243 
Rhinoceros, 53 
Rigollet, 58 
RigVeda, 41, 289 
Kock temples, 209, 211 
Rocking stones, 273 
Rogers, 60, 208 
Roguery, 423 
Rohrig, 1C9 
Rolliston, 91 
Roman bridge, 63 
Rome's relics, 357 
Romulus, 152 
Roots of words, 162 
Roots in bogs, 185 
Rosetta stone, 236 
Rosiere. 66 
Ross. 135 

Rossii Et. JEg., 225 
Rouen gravels, 60 
Roujou, 268 
Roxbury gravel, 97 
Rubens, 407 
Runic, (A. T.), 241, 242 
Ruskin, 6 
Rutimeyer, 128 

S, initia I, 228 
S forms, 241 
SabEBism, 254 
Sabine, 6, 323 
Sahara. 64 
Salute Chapelle, 197 
Salisbury, 268 
Salvation, 230 
San, 148 

Sandiflcation, 304 
Sanssrit forgery, 137 
Sanscrit lan.guage, 158 
Sanscrit A, 240 
Sanscrit mythology, 291 
Sarah laugiiing, 283 
Sarandib, 222 
Sarcophagus, 192, 198 
Sarcophagus ark, 226 
Savages of stone age, 130 
Savages versus civilized, 

201 
Savages have no art, 208 
Sava,gery, 268 
Savings banks, 381 
Scale of years, 63, 65 
Scandinavian ice, 324 
Scarabaei, 49 
Scherzer, 107 



INDEX. 



441 



Schism, 431 
Schlagintweit, 39 
Schlegel; 165 
Schmerlmg, 52, 54 
Schools of finance, 375 
School convention, 417 
Schott, 169 
Schroder, 119 
Schwarz, 107 
Sciences coordinate, 3 
Science falsely so called, 

21 
Scoop, scap, 229 
Scott, 15 

Scratched bones, 184 
Scribe, statue, 200 
Scriptures, 18 
Scrutin de liste, 394 
Sculpture, 265 
Sea, shi-shi, 242 
Sect, feeling, 429 
Sedgewick, 46 
Segregation of types, 48 
Sepulchral mound, 190 
Sesostris, 14, 152 
Seth-Aten, 283 
Seti 1, 283 

Shadows of tiles, 212 
Shalmanezar, 275 
Shan, mount, 247 
Shanghu's daughter, 136 
Shape of letters, 232 
Sheep, pyramids, 155 
Sheep, ship, 251 
Shernites, 115 
Sheshonk, 151 
Shingle-stealer, 313 
Ship, cap, 229 
Shophetim, 215 
Shorthand, 268 
Sicily caves, 59 
Signal service, 327 
Silurian age, 48 
Silver, 345, 384 
Silver mine, Somerset, 272 
Simoda earthquake, 6 
Sin, 310 
Sinbad, 45 
Singing bird, 246 
Sipylus, 216 
Sion, skull type, 118 
Sirius worship, 37 
Skar, to cut, 215 
Skulls, 96, 

Skulls, Swiss types, 118 
Skulls of man, 102 
Slander, 316 
Smith (P.), 39 ; (R.), 1 
Social destiny, 355 
Societies, 369 
Sociology, 122, 361 
Solonion. 153 
Solomon seal, 275 
Soma. 144 
Sonnne gravels, 57 
Sophia, 17, 24 
Sophocles, 289 
Soul, 245 
Species, 76, 94 
Speech, 399 
Speke, 39 

Spencer, 73, 82, 165 
Sphinx temple, 210 
Spinoza. 255 
Spirit, 238, 245 
Spirit-well boring, 272 
Spontaneous generation, 

162 
Sraddha. 257 
St. Acheul gravels, 60 
St. Auhin pxlotis, 268 



St. Clemens Chiirch, 357 

St. George's, 218 

St. Martin, 236 

St. Paul's gnosis, 23 

St. Radigonde, 186 

St. Seurm, 341 

Stag in caves, 53 

Stag and doe. picture, 259 

Standards of Rome, 187 

Standing army, 390 

Stars,star, 30, 34 

Starvation, 423 

Statutes, Boulag, 100 

Statutes, fourth dynasty, 

405 
Statuettes, 199 
Steam engine, 338 
Steam machinery, 372 
Steenstrup, 132 
Steles, 196 
Stephens, 218 
Stephenson, 11 
Sterility of Syria, 143 
Stewart (B.), 323 
Stilobate, 227 
Stm, judge, 215 
Stokes, 323 

Stone, in languages, 182 
Stone age art, 185 
Stonehenge, 190 
Stone circles, 215 
Storm theory, 329 
Strabo. 9 
Stratification. 47 
Strata In order, 62 
Structural geology, 4 
Style in architec-ture, 218 
Style, column, 227 
Style, pencil, 228 
Styles in China, 249 
Submergence, 64 
Succession of forms, 49 
Suffrage, 393, 395 
Sufites, 114 
Sufued Koh, 222 
Sumner, 208 
Sunderbunds, 41 
Sun-worshippers, 31 
Sunlight, 238 
Sunshine, 246 
Sun spots, 322 
Supernatural, 8 
Superstitions, 17, 18 
Superstitions existent, 29 
Superstitions personal, 27 1 
Surveying, 40 
Surveying, geological, 343 
Surveying Palestine, 350 
Surya hymns, 289 
Susim, 148 
Susquehanna. 187 
Sutech-Baal, 150, 282 
Swathmore, 417 
Swedeiiborg, 255 
Swiss palafittes, 125 
Swiss flints, 188 
Swords of bronze, 340 
Syene, 410 
Syllogism, 431 
Symmetry, 201 
Synthesis, 82 

Tahmu race, 266 
Tanis, 148 
Tantalus, 216 
Tariff, 375 
Tartarus, 217 
Taste, 165, 201 
Taurus, 217 
Taxation, 374 
Tchouan script, 248 



Techen, obelisk, 225 
Tel, taurus, 217 
Tel Amarna, 283 
Telegon, 216 
Telegraphs, 342 
Telephones, 330 
Temple at Bai8e,63 
Temple tombs, 209 
Temple to the Sphinx, 210 
Tendencies, 428 
Tenement houses, 421 
Tennyson, 16 
Tertiary man, 61 
Thackeray, 15 
Theb, 217,237 
Thibetan temiile, 219 
The possible, 295 
Theft, 316, 388 
Thompson, 132 
Thumb of man, 89 
Thurman, 268 
Thsau-hie, 247 
Ti tomb, 196 
Tien shan, 324 
Tinae immeasurable, 50 
Time, clock, 65 
Tini^re cone, 64 
Tobacco, 350 
Tombs first built, 190 
Tomb of Sethos, 194 
Tomb temples, 209 
Tool, 229 
Tor-ites, 227 
Torquay, 53 
Torques, 188 
Tortoise, 247 
Totmes, 154 
Toulouse, 212 
Tournal, 52 
Towanda, 126 
Trades unions, 369 
Trade and commerce, 385 
Tramps, 422 
Transportation, 386 
Transposed letters, 237 
Trautwlne, 208 
Treadwell, 11 
Triangulation, 332 
Triglyph, 212 
Trlm'urti, 277 
Triumphe, 278 
Troglodytes, 10 
Trondjim, 64 
Trov, 217, 355 
Troyon, 61, 66, 127, 259 
Truth In art, 2 
Truth, Ma, 228 
Tunner, 341 
Turanian, 41, 115 
Turks, 107,361 
Turner, 39 
Turzac relics, 258 
Tutmosis, 31 
Tvashtr, 292 
Types of man, 65 
Types of Cuvier, 77 
Types of religions, 253 
Types of life, 253 
Tyranny, 388 

Dhlmann, 225 
Ulysses, 216 
Umber. 278 
Umpire, 279 

Underground curves, 331 
Undertakers, 199 
Unity, 77, 94 
Unltarianism, 279, 431 
Unluugulus, 70 
Universities, 419 
Up, 173, 177 



442 



INDEX. 



Urn, ark, 226 
Use, ownership, 363 
Usury, 378 
Utznach, 64 

Valley of the Gard, 53 
Van der Kolk, 119 
Variety, 76 
Varuna, 290 
Vase, 235 
Vedas, 356 
Vesuvius, 87 
Victoria falls, 143 
Village sheik, 200 
Vion, 60 
Virchow, 107 
Vitruvius, 219 
Vogt, 101, 110, 118 
Volcanoes, 331 
Volga, 142 
Von Baer, 107, 255 
Von Bnch, 4 
Von Struve, 6 
Voskoboinikof , 222 
Voting, suffrage, 394 
Vrolick, 119 
Vyse, 39 

"Wages, 377 
Wagner's skulls, 103 



120 



Wallace, 326 
Walrus in S. C, 325 
Wangen pilotis, 129 
War, 388 
Waste, 335 
Water symbol, 241 
Wave line, 242 
Weapons, 263 
Weather charts, 328 
Weaving, 127 
Webster, 96 
Well's legends, 186 
Wedding ring, 271 
Welcker, 107 
Welsh language, 159 
Wedge letters, 239 
Wedge on altar, 239 
Westminster, 220, 307 
Whewell, 7 
V/hite{B.), 255 
White Mountains, 222 
White pine, 351 
White race, 115 
Whitney (W.), 169, 175 
Whitney (J. D.), 324 
Wilkesbarre, 207 
William, Ety., 252 
Wilson, 14, 132 
Wind, in language, 182 
Women, excluded, 257 



Women educated, 414 
Women lawyers, 415 
Woods, organic, 161 
Word fetich, 275 
Word painting, 2 
Word roots, 162 
Work the basis, 123 
Worsac, 132 

Worship of dead. 192, 256 
Worship types, 253 
Wren, 220 
Writing, old, 155 
Wyoming valley, 206 

Xerxes, 235 

Yadu, 144 
Yao, 247 
Yellow iron, 139 
Yellow race, 116 
Y-King, 244 

Z, th, S, 242 
Zerbhokhia, 289 
Zoan, 148, 356 
Zodiac, 36 
Zoology. 347 
Zoo. Gardens, 449 
Zoroaster, 14, 286 



um. 



